By Ray Umashankar | Executive Director
"Why are girls in rural India vulnerable to sex trafficking?"- a question from my daughter Nita, (co- Founder of ASSET India Foundation) sent me on a search, resulting in a discovery of startling facts. Girls education has become a cliche- money raised for building schools, libraries, books and computers. No one ever stopped to ask why girls are missing school ONE WEEK every month, fall behind, get ridiculed and bullied and eventually drop out of school in rural India.
The answer to Nita's question is Menstruation and the lack of availability of sanitary pads. It became clear that if I made sanitary pads available and kept the girls in school, they get educated, dream of a bright future and escape the attention of sex traffickers.
My search for a sustainable, scalable and environmentally friendly sanitary pad manufacturing operation took me far and wide. The solutions I came across did not meet any of my selection criteria.
After searching for more than a year, I finally found a passionate group of young engineers based in Mumbai who are dedicated to producing and distributing sanitary pads to keep girls in school and not drop out. Saral Designs was founded by Suhani Mohan and her friends all of whom are IIT grads.
http://www.saraldesigns.in/about-us/
My conversations. with Suhani have helped Suhani understand our need to scale and to be able to serve girls thousand villages in partnership with the Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation. She and her team have thought through the entire manufacturing and distribution processes and I am very impressed. To start with, I have proposed that the Saral Designs pads be distributed among girls in 150 villages in Assam that are reaching through our school bus Mukti Caravan anti trafficking education program.
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