Malayalam for "Bridge"
A youth led initiative dismantling the culture of silence surrounding menstrual health across India.
In India, menstruation is the leading reason adolescent girls abandon their education, not poverty, not distance, not conflict. Silence.
23 million girls drop out of school each year at the onset of menstruation. Not because they are incapable. Because the infrastructure, the knowledge, and the conversation were never built for them.
88% of women in rural India use cloth, ash, or sand as a substitute for sanitary products. Period poverty is not abstract. It is the lived reality of the majority, and it compounds every other form of inequality a woman faces.
71% of adolescent girls across India reported having no knowledge of menstruation before their first period. The result is not confusion. It is shame. And shame compounds across generations unless something actively interrupts it.
The economic impact of girls leaving the workforce prematurely, directly tied to educational disruption from menstrual stigma, runs into the thousands of crores annually. This is not a welfare issue. It is a moral and economic emergency that is entirely within our power to solve.
"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"
The founding question of Paalam