By Anshu Gupta | Founder Director
Goonj’s ‘MY Pad’ is a better piece of cloth for women who have very little. It is meant for women, families and communities where cloth is still a scarce commodity. We are using MY Pads to reach these women and talk to them about their menstrual health and hygiene. In this process MY Pad has become a tool to get women to speak, to share and to better understand this basic biological process.
Many women in rural and slum India reuse cloth for menstruation but often don't have a safe and clean way of carrying their used pads (to wash and reuse later). Keeping in mind this practical difficulty, at Goonj we devised an innovative idea. We are adding a little pouch with Goonj cloth pads (MY Pads) made from flex banners and tarps (used ones) going out to rural India. These pouches are leak proof,cheap and a sustainable way of making reuse of cloth possible.
The journey of Not Just a piece of Cloth better known as NJPC is over a decade old now. It has gone through many trials and changes based on the inputs of the women who use it. My Pad is made after removing the hooks, button, elastic and any other hard material from the sorted cotton and semi cotton cloth. Soaked overnight in sanitizers followed by washing and then sun dried in open, first the outer cover of MY Pad is cut in the size of 12x 16 inches. It’s then ironed to make it moisture free. Then the smaller cloth pieces/shreds are wrapped in the outer cover as fillers. The outer cover is then folded, giving it a shape of a pad. Each packet of MY Pads has 15 pieces.
In this financial year alone more than 31,000 packets (@15 pads each packet) have been produced so far along with more than 16,000 undergarments (made out of waste hosiery material). These are not only reaching women in Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Bengal, MP and other states but also many slums of Delhi and NCR apart from going as an integral part of relief material. Right now MY Pads are being produced in Delhi only, with a daily production average of around 150 packets (i.e. 2250 pieces).
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