In India, pushing through a policy is easier than changing a culture. Period

Karnataka’s menstrual leave policy is worthy of applause. But it exists in a country where menstruating women can be stripped and humiliated any time, without a hiccup.

Gate 2, Maharshi Dayanand University, Haryana | Photo: Manisha Mondal, ThePrint

In India, progress and heartache arrive on the same track.

Earlier in October, the state cabinet approved the Karnataka Menstrual Leave Policy 2025, which provides one day of paid leave per month to women across government and private sectors. The landmark decision affects over 50 lakh women workers. Two weeks later, at Maharshi Dayanand University in Haryana’s Rohtak, two female sanitation workers were allegedly forced by male supervisors to photograph their sanitary pads to prove they were menstruating.

The menstrual leave policy is an admirable step down a blazing path. It should feel like a milestone. And it would feel like one — if we could stop taking two steps back.

Karnataka has joined a small but, hopefully, growing list of Indian states that recognise menstrual health as a workplace right. In 1992, Bihar led the way by granting two days of paid menstrual leave per month to government employees. Former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav ordained the measure while resolving a larger agitation around equal pay — a policy that has now been in place for over three decades.

Odisha followed suit in 2024, introducing a similar provision for women in the public sector under the age of 55. Kerala offers menstrual leave to female students and staff in state universities and ITIs. And last year, Chandigarh’s Panjab University became the first university in northern India to offer students menstrual leave.

Globally, the idea has been around even longer. Japan introduced statutory period leave in 1947. Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Zambia have variations of the policy. Spain became the first European country to formalise it, allowing three to five days with a doctor’s note.

Haryana lays bare the sickening reality

In this context, Karnataka’s decision is a significant acknowledgment that menstrual health is not a peripheral “women’s issue” but a legitimate workplace concern. There are, of course, valid critiques of the policy’s limits — primarily, how many women will remain excluded from it. Indian garment workers, for instance, cannot even access sick leave without losing pay. Eighty-one per cent of Indian women are employed in the informal sector — farm labourers, piece-rate workers, domestic staff, sanitation karamcharis — for whom menstrual leave remains a distant prospect.

Despite that, Karnataka has shifted menstrual leave from the realm of special concession into the territory of labour rights. It stems from the understanding that bodies have limits; that women’s pain is real and should not be questioned; and that male-centric workplaces must adapt to the biology of half the workforce.

Which is why what happened at MDU Rohtak is all the more sickening.

On 26 October, three female sanitation workers at the university were cleaning the sports complex ahead of the Haryana governor’s visit. Their male supervisors allegedly pressured them to work faster. When the women said that they couldn’t because they were experiencing menstrual pain, the supervisors forced them to go to the washroom and take photographs of their soiled pads.

An FIR has since been registered against the two supervisors and the assistant registrar under various charges, including sexual harassment, assault with intent to disrobe, outraging a woman’s modesty, and criminal intimidation. The supervisors have been suspended and the university has promised an internal inquiry, vowing that “those found guilty will not be spared”.

But policies and due process are not on the stand here. A culture where social class and biology dictate whether you should be believed, and whether you are entitled to basic dignity, is.

In 2020, when Zomato introduced 10 days of paid period leave annually, CEO Deepinder Goyal wrote a memo to his employees. At the end, he addressed the men specifically: “Our female colleagues expressing that they are on their period leave shouldn’t be uncomfortable for us. This is a part of life, and while we don’t fully understand what women go through, we need to trust them when they say they need to rest this out. I know that menstrual cramps are very painful for a lot of women—and we have to support them through it if we want to build a truly collaborative culture at Zomato.”

I wonder what the MDU safai karamcharis would have thought of these quaint buzzwords.

The distance between Zomato’s Gurgaon headquarters and MDU Rohtak is barely two hours by road. But the gap between the food-tech company’s progressive HR policies and Tier-2 India’s frontline reality, might as well be unbridgeable. The cruelty and abasement of asking women cleaning toilets and mopping floors to photograph their private parts is the whole point.

In the cloak of religiosity

The MDU incident isn’t even an aberration. This ritual humiliation of menstruating girls and women is part of a robust pattern.

A few months ago, at a government-aided school in Thane, minor girls from classes 5 to 10 were subjected to forced “period checks” after blood stains were discovered in the washroom. The principal and a female attendant made the children strip to identify who was menstruating. The goal was to find the source of “pollution”. Both the principal and attendant were arrested and charged under the POCSO Act.

Perhaps the most scarring incident is from Bhuj. In 2020, at the Shree Sahajanand Girls Institute in Gujarat, a college run by a trust affiliated with the Swaminarayan Temple, 68 female students were forced to remove their undergarments to check who was on their period. The suspicion was that menstruating girls had violated religious “purity rules” by entering the institute’s temple and dining hall. Following an FIR, the principal, the hostel coordinator, and a peon were arrested.

Back then, the girls’ parents were up in arms. No one, however, questioned the existing rules, which dictated that menstruating students should spend the entirety of their period in a “menstruation room” in the basement and not enter the kitchen, the temple area, or touch others.

On a TV debate, Swami Chakrapani, the president of Hindu Mahasabha, had admonished his panellists – a woman anchor and a woman activist – and tried to spin the medieval regulation as a “suvidha”, or a facility accorded to menstruating women. A few days later, Krushnaswarup Dasji, a religious leader associated with the temple, declared that menstruating women who cook for their husbands would be reborn as dogs, and the men who ate that food would be reborn as bullocks.

When the needle moved — seemingly 

This whole conversation feels like it belongs in 2018. That year, it felt like we were finally getting somewhere.

That was the year Period. End of Sentence, won the best documentary (short) Oscar. It was also the year Akshay Kumar’s Pad Man released, cementing his position as the surest vehicle for the government’s various new schemes. Union minister of Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi, launched the #YesIBleed campaign, urging women to speak openly about their cycles. May 28 was celebrated as Menstrual Hygiene Day, with the aspirational and defiant theme #NoMoreLimits. The government launched the Jan Aushadhi Suvidha Sanitary Napkin scheme, promising affordable, environment-friendly pads at subsidised rates. Parliament saw the introduction of the Menstruation Benefits Bill.

And then, in September, the Supreme Court delivered the Sabarimala judgment, a constitutional thunderclap that allowed women of menstruating age to enter the temple. The court ruled that excluding them violated their fundamental rights, and that purity-based discrimination had no place in a modern republic.

There was genuine momentum. We were talking about period poverty, about access to products and safe spaces, about treating menstruation as a health issue rather than a source of hysteria or disgrace. It felt like we were mainstreaming the subject, dismantling shame, and that a third space had opened up. Menstruation didn’t need to be boxed into either complete silence or the giddy, toxic effervescence of TV ads.

But seven years later, the optimism of 2018 has curdled into the tired recognition: pushing through a policy is easier than changing a culture.

Karnataka’s menstrual leave policy is worthy of applause. But it exists in a country where menstruating women can be stripped and humiliated, without a hiccup. We’re not having a conversation about menstrual leave in India; we are having two entirely separate conversations: one about workplace rights, and another about whether menstruation is pollution, whether women’s bodies are public property, and whether we should believe them. One India grants them menstrual leave. The other demands photographic evidence to prove they deserve it.

Progress and heartache, running on the same track. I just wish they didn’t collide so often.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)