Research Projects

Menstrual health is an essential, yet neglected area, gender and public health aspect in India — with the scope of menstrual hygiene management (MHM) acknowledged across various national programs through sanitation and reproductive health commitments. Existing research and interventions often ignore the spatial and social disparities in menstrual care access — especially in the urban poor communities of Kolkata's slums and climate-vulnerable, peri-urban villages in South 24 Parganas, where women are not getting the necessary level of care around MHM, services, or infrastructure and understandings around their menstrual health. The menstrual experiences of marginalized women particularly women from tribal, migrant, hawker, sex worker, or low-income contexts are the result of not only biology but also their geo-social locations, i.e. where they live, work and their caste, class, and cultural relations. In South 24 Parganas, low-lying areas prone to flooding, riverbank erosion and poor sanitation systems creates a hostile experience in menstrual health and sanitation practices among displaced and climate-migrants women. In regards to Kolkata's urban poor community's use of MHM, overcrowding, absence of safe toilets and poor hygiene responsiveness to social stigma is problematic. It is essential that the confluence between socially constructed environmental vulnerabilities and socio-economic deprivation allow for a comparison based evidence-based investigation.Despite this pressing need, there is a dearth of spatially referenced data and geo-tagged analyses of menstrual health infrastructure that are available to policymakers and stakeholders to develop appropriate targeted responses to menstrual health. It is also noteworthy that menstrual health is typically understood and documented solely through a health lens (e.g., menstrual disorders), or social lens (e.g., stigma) and these perspectives rarely intersect. Spatial science (GIS/RS) has not been used to visualize inequity in menstrual health or mixed-methods to understand lived experiences (or both). We seek to fill these urgent spaces with a geo-social approach by using complementary field-based surveys, focus group discussions, and GIS mapping the multiple facets of inequities in menstrual health in India.