The ‘Asmita’ scheme won’t subsidise or distribute napkins for free – it’ll sell them at nominal prices, and plans to provide them to all women in the state.
Mumbai: This International Women’s Day, the Maharashtra government will launch a unique scheme, named ‘Asmita’, to provide sanitary napkins at a reasonable cost for women across economic classes and social strata.
The government will officially launch the scheme on Thursday in the presence of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and actor Akshay Kumar, who recently starred in Padman, a film promoting menstrual hygiene.
The state government has issued tenders and tied up with three small-scale enterprises to manufacture the sanitary napkins. Self-help groups will sell these to women at a small profit. An eight-pad packet will be available for Rs 24 and Rs 29 in two specifications.
While the scheme is initially aimed at women in rural Maharashtra, the government hopes to expand it to urban centres too, and even sell the low-cost sanitary napkins online directly in the future.
Moreover, the government will subsidise sanitary napkins for girl students studying in Zilla Parishad schools — they’ll be available for Rs 5 per eight-pad packet.
Expanding reach, making pads affordable
Pankaja Munde, the state’s minister for rural development and women and child development, said: “As per a preliminary survey, we found that currently only 17 per cent of Maharashtra’s menstruating rural women use sanitary napkins. Through this scheme, we want to take the number to 70 per cent in the first phase and 100 per cent in the next phase.
“So far, more than a thousand self-help groups have registered with us for the scheme. We hope to take the number to 10,000 self-help groups by the end of the month. We eventually want to have one in every village.
“We will only be happy if this scheme pushes other sanitary napkin manufacturers to lower their prices.”
Aseem Gupta, secretary of the rural development department, said the self-help groups will also sell these pads to women in urban areas. Eventually, the department’s Mission Umed, which works towards social inclusion and bringing women from rural poor households under the self-help group network, will sell the low-cost sanitary napkins online directly to buyers. Mission Umed is the nodal agency for the scheme.
“Umed is now registering itself with e-commerce companies such as Flipkart and Amazon, and buyers can directly purchase sanitary napkins from there. That way, Umed projects will make money, and this will finally result in helping the self-help groups,” Gupta said.
The roll-out plan
Gupta said international guidelines for specifications of sanitary napkins, issued in 1983, are outdated. So the government purchased the costliest sanitary napkin available in the market, studied its specifications, and put out a contract for the manufacture of its own sanitary napkins.
Self-help groups registered under the Asmita scheme can place orders with the manufacturers on the government portal. The groups will have a mobile application on which they have to scan the barcode on the delivery package. Once the barcode is scanned, the order will be processed as received and money will be deducted from the accounts of the self-help groups and transferred to the manufacturers.
While the cost price of a basic sanitary napkin packet with eight pads will be Rs 19.20, the retail price for sale by self-help groups will be Rs 24.
The government will cap the distribution of the subsidised Rs 5 packets for school students to 13 packets a year, to ensure the scheme is not misused.
It will flag off four vehicles fitted with screens to travel across the state and give information about the scheme, menstrual hygiene, show related documentaries, and ferry street-play artists from district to district to promote the scheme.
What makes Maharashtra’s scheme different
There have been prior efforts by governments across the country to provide sanitary napkins to girls of a certain age or income group either free of cost or at a subsidised rate. However, this is the first effort to make sanitary napkins available at affordable prices for women across age groups and classes, officials said.
“The scheme is different for many reasons. Primarily, it doesn’t look at subsidising sanitary napkins and increasing their use, but lowering their costs and increasing their use,” Gupta said.
The Chhattisgarh government has launched a scheme to provide sanitary napkins at subsidised costs to students of government schools, while the Odisha government has launched a scheme to supply sanitary napkins to students free of cost. Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar too has announced a similar initiative.
Under former CM Sheila Dikshit, the Delhi government too had introduced a scheme to provide free sanitary napkins to girl students of government schools.
Gupta said: “All other governments have procured sanitary napkins, subsidised them, and sold or distributed them to selective beneficiaries. We, on the other hand, are facilitating the manufacture of low-cost sanitary napkins and ensuring that self-help groups earn money in the distribution.”
He added that some states have tried to use self-help groups to manufacture sanitary napkins, but that involves expensive equipment that the groups will have to take a loan and purchase. Also, it is not possible to have quality control when there are multiple manufacturers.