The Political Machineries of Sanitary Pads as Pro-Poor Technologies: Between India and the World

• In Event: The Politics of Science and Technology in International Development 3

Abstract

This paper investigates the “political machineries” that have produced sanitary pads as a pro-poor technology in India. It examines the knowledge and expertise that produced sanitary pads as a technological solution to the problem of gender equity, and the values, logics, processes, and rules with which they are intertwined. The Indian sanitary pad story began around 2005, when public health and international development experts began to argue that girls were missing many days of school, and sometimes dropping out entirely, because they lacked both the education and effective material tools to capture blood flow during menstruation. Academic and NGO experts offered data that linked school absenteeism and health problems among girls to the lack of these tools. These experts also argued that girls and women were contracting illnesses because the materials that they used to manage menstrual flow were not hygienic. Despite multiple weaknesses in this data, there was enormous enthusiasm in this technological solution. Soon, international organizations provided grants to entrepreneurs, NGOs, and small businesses both inside India and around the world, to develop and distribute sanitary pads to poor women. Fueling the emerging market, by 2010 the Indian government had begun to provide highly subsidized sanitary pads to adolescent girls in rural areas. In this analysis, the paper investigates the politics of knowledge that underlie sanitary pads as a pro-poor technology, and also analyzes whether there are patterns in how either governmental and non-governmental, or international and Indian actors, approach the intervention.

Author

• Shobita Parthasarathy, University of Michigan