Rags to the Rescue

The Indian Express, New Delhi, 16 Mar 2008

Goonj, which received the Best Indian NGO Award, runs a unique project, turning rags into sanitary napkins.

What does one need for survival? Well, besides food, cloth and shelter, says Anshu Gupta, humans require dignity, and for women, a piece of cloth to use during her period is essential. The founder of Goonj, Gupta has launched a unique initiative to promote the use of sanitary napkins among rural women in UP, Bihar and Orissa. He reuses discarded cloth to make sanitary napkins at Rs 3  for a pack of five.

“In the villages of Bihar and Orissa, where people don’t have enough clothes, many women don’t use anything during their periods. For them, every month brings a lot of trauma,” says Gupta, who started making sanitary napkins four years ago.

The napkins are made from dupattas, lungies and torn salwars that can no longer be worn. At the Goonj office in Sarita Vihar, about ten women are employed in washing the linen, drying it, cutting it into stripes, folding it and then filling it with clean rags until the useless piece of cloth is transformed into a sanitary napkin, which is then packed in paper bags and sent away for distribution.

Founded in 1998, Goonj began collecting clothes in cities and distributing it in rural areas. From a small organisation with two members and 67 clothes, the organisation now distributes 20,000 kilos of cloth to 19 states in the country and has also started collecting and distributing toys, furniture and paper.

Goonj’s efforts have not gone unacknowledged. On March 5th, it received the Best Indian NGO Award 2007 from Finance Minister P Chidambaram at the Annual India NGO Awards ceremony organised by the Resource Alliance and the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation in Delhi.

For Anshu Gupta, the “hard-earned” award came as a pleasant surprise. “Goonj has been working in a field that very few people work in on a regular basis. Usually, organisations wait for disaster before taking up cloth distribution. But what they don’t realise is that half the population of India is always facing a crisis of not having enough clothes to wear,” says Gupta.

Though more and more people in cities are donating clothes now, Gupta has a complaint. “In India people donate what they can, not what people require. I mean, what would villagers do with a pair of torn jeans?”