Maya Vishwakarma’s fight against menstrual silence transformed rural India through low-cost pads, awareness campaigns, and a movement for dignity and choice.
Rashmeet Kaur Chawla
Menstruation has always been a taboo subject in Indian society, especially in rural communities where silence passes for tradition and discomfort becomes inheritance. Maya Vishwakarma grew up inside that silence in Mehragaon, Madhya Pradesh. Like most girls around her, she used old cloth every month until the age of 26. Not because she chose to — but because she didn’t know she had a choice.
The infections that followed weren’t seen as medical issues. They were brushed aside as “normal for women.” But those quiet illnesses left a mark. They planted a question that had no place in her village:
Why should something so natural be treated like a secret?
Years later, studying biochemistry in the United States and working as a cancer researcher, the contrast hit harder. In the lab, menstruation was science — clear, clean, openly discussed. Back home, it was a whispered impurity.
The distance sharpened her discomfort into clarity. The problem wasn’t culture. The problem was silence — and silence was costing women their health, dignity, and even their schooling. Her conflict crystallised into a belief she couldn’t unsee.
The Core Belief
"The real taboo isn’t menstruation. The real taboo is denying women the right to understand their own bodies."
When Maya returned to India in 2016, she did not come back to nostalgia — she came back to confront a silence that had shaped her own life. The Sukarma Foundation began as a simple idea: access and awareness had to go hand in hand. It was not enough to talk about menstrual hygiene if women had nothing affordable to use. And it was not enough to distribute pads if myths continued to govern behaviour.
Her first step was building something tangible. Inspired by Arunachalam Muruganantham’s low-cost pad-making machines, she set up a manufacturing unit in Narsinghpur and created the “No Tension” sanitary pads — priced deliberately for rural women and produced by local women themselves. The small unit did more than manufacture pads; it created ownership. Women who had once whispered about their periods now made the very product society told them to hide.
Maya’s work expanded outward, village by village. She travelled across tribal belts with a projector and a set of simple educational tools, standing in courtyards, schools, community halls, or under trees — wherever women felt comfortable enough to gather. These sessions didn’t just debunk myths; they opened conversations that had been dormant for generations. In 2018 alone, she and her team reached 22 tribal districts and engaged more than 20,000 women and girls.
Her work pushed against the reality that almost 97–98 percent of rural women still rely on cloth, and millions of girls drop out of school due to menstrual issues. She refused to accept these numbers as cultural inevitabilities. Through initiatives like Padwoman on the Wheel and local-language menstrual hygiene calendars, Maya created tools that felt native to the communities she served. Her approach was never about delivering solutions from above; it was about rebuilding confidence from within.
Resistance came from expected places — families unsure of the work, communities hesitant to discuss menstruation, people questioning why a woman should travel alone to talk about something “private.” Yet every challenge only confirmed why she needed to persist. She wasn’t fighting a practice; she was fighting a silence that had become tradition simply because no one had challenged it long enough.
How One Woman’s Fight Against Silence Became a Movement
Over time the effects of her work began to compound. Girls who once stayed home during their periods continued attending school. Women who had normalised infections started recognising them as treatable. Conversations that had never occurred in public spaces became ordinary parts of community gatherings. The taboo did not vanish overnight, but it loosened its hold — replaced slowly by clarity, dignity, and choice.
Recognition followed, though it was never the goal. Her documentary Swaraj Mumkin Hai won at the World Independent Film Festival in 2018. Awards like the Devi Award (2020) and the DNA Women Achievers Award (2023) acknowledged her impact. But the real validation came from places no award ceremony could capture — a mother teaching her daughter what she once never understood, a girl staying in school because hygiene stopped being a barrier, a group of women producing pads they once hid.
Maya’s journey resolved the very conflict she carried since childhood. The silence that dictated her early years no longer dictated the lives of thousands of rural girls. What began as a private discomfort turned into a public movement — one built not on protest, but on persistence, clarity, and the refusal to accept that tradition should come at the cost of women’s health.
Maya’s story shows that lasting change rarely begins with loud declarations — it begins when someone decides that inherited silence is no longer acceptable, and then keeps pushing until a community starts speaking for itself.
Maya’s journey leaves behind a question that rural India must now answer for itself:
If one woman’s refusal to stay silent can change the lives of thousands, what else might shift the moment we stop treating discomfort as destiny?
• Maya Vishwakarma – Sukarma Foundation
• Sukarma Foundation (Official Website)
• World Independent Film Festival
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