Kashmir doctor’s journey to ensure sanitary napkins for poor girls

Srinagar, Nov 02: Kashmir is lucky to have a female doctor who has been over the years working on a project Panin Fikar (Self-Care) ensuring that poor girls in Srinagar get sanitary napkins free and are informed about menstrual health and hygiene.
The menstrual hygiene of women in Kashmir has remained less important and women still hesitate to talk about it with men, which is worrisome for the doctors as well.
Dr Auqfeen Nisar, a doctor working in the health department Kashmir said when she was pursuing MD in Community Medicine at GMC, Srinagar, she was once treating patients during a weekly OPD in Nandpora, Srinagar in 2018 where she got shocked to see adolescent girls using cloth during their periods.
She was deputed to a sub-centre there to monitor the government’s immunization programme. It was at this time that many adolescent girls turned up to her to seek consultation about problems related to menstrual hygiene which pained her.
“I was there for a year and girls used to come to me with different complaints. Their menstrual hygiene wasn’t good. I counselled them and tried to find out barriers,” she said.
It was an eye-opener for Auqfeen. She conducted door-to-door visits in Nandpora catering to a population of 4,000 people and interviewed 200 adolescent girls.
Of the 200 females, 75 percent were in the reproductive age group. They weren’t using sanitary pads, which was worrisome. Most of them belonged to the lower class.
The 33-year-old doctor said affordability and lack of awareness about menstrual hygiene were the biggest barriers.
“Most girls complained of irritation and allergy. Many of them would spend more time in the washroom. When I asked why they were not using pads, they said their mothers had told them that the materials used in napkins lead to infertility,” she said.
Auqfeen started crowd-funding to provide sanitary pads to the impoverished girls. She started an individual project in January 2019 and named it ‘Panin Fikar’ which translates to ‘Let’s take care of ourselves’, a project in social marketing to enhance the use of sanitary pads among adolescent girls.
To sustain the project she decided to buy low cost sanitary napkins and distributed it among the girls at subsidized rates.
“Sustainability was a problem. I organized programmes on behavioural change communication for them and asked them to talk about menstrual hygiene,” she said.
Auqfeen said the adolescent girls had a wrong notion that menstrual hygiene was bad and that they would deal with it badly.
“The families were not supportive of the adolescent girls. It was scary for them. Behavioural change was an important part of the project,” she said.
After motivating girls to use pads, the next step Auqfeen plans did was to create a Self Help Group in the community that would raise and utilise the initiative.
“Even in the heart of Srinagar girls were still using cloth during periods. It is really heart rendering. In villages, the condition is worse,” she said.
The doctor said that among the poorer sections of the society, women still face inequality. “Even if people have good social-economic status, girls don’t get money for menstrual hygiene,” the doctor said.
She said during her awareness programmes in Nandpora she advised school-going girls to carry a polythene bag with them and dispose of it at home.
Auqfeen has decided to start her website where she can seek the support of stakeholders in the Valley for her individual project.
“Many women, mostly young adolescent girls with different ailments, come to me. In most of the cases, girls have menstrual hygiene problems,” she said.
Auqfeen said she never thought the girls would have such poor knowledge about menstrual hygiene but she tried to find out the barriers that kept them from getting this knowledge.
She found two reasons as to why adolescent girls stay away from using sanitary pads during their periods – lack of awareness and impoverishment.
“These girls were influenced by their mothers. I found mothers would discourage them not to use sanitary pads as they had a notion that it causes infertility. Apart from the wrong counselling, social taboos also keep girls away,” the doctor said.
“This being the story of the girls who reside in the city, one can only imagine what will be the state of awareness of hygiene among the girls in far-off rural places,” she said.
For spreading awareness about menstrual hygiene, Auqfeen wants to go to the peripheries where social taboos are more prevalent. “I will start a website where I can ask people to contribute for the cause so that I can assist them and they come out,” she said.
In March 2019, Auqfeen went to Sumbal area of north Kashmir’s Bandipora area where she was surprised after knowing that there was no concept of menstrual hygiene.
“The adult and married women are reluctant to change. Adolescent girls can help in the community if they are counselled at a proper time,” she said.
“Awareness sessions should be held to make females aware about how important menstrual hygiene is. There should be specific clinics in hospitals to provide counselling to the women,” Auqfeen said.