Health & Wellness
A diagnosis, 15,000 pads and a collective in New Delhi
Niyamat Kochhar started Menstra in 2023 after a PMOS diagnosis, and says it now reaches up to 3,000 beneficiaries through its workshops, pad drives, pad-on-a-roll placements and research.
One person disposes of 15,000 pads in a lifetime. Each is 90% plastic. Each can take up to 800 years to decompose. Those are the numbers Niyamat Kochhar found after her own diagnosis.
"This means pads used today will still be in landfills when my grandchildren have grandchildren!" she says.
“The youth of today don't wait at the periphery. They challenge systems, rebuild them and lead the movements that put autonomy, agency and justice at the center of the conversation.”
Niyamat Kochhar
Menstra began in 2023 as a personal mission, she says, after she was diagnosed with painful PMOS, a condition she describes as linked to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment. She is at Delhi University. Learning that billions of plastic products enter our waterbodies "proved this crisis is as much environmental as it is deeply personal," she says.
The work runs through menstrual health awareness, climate action workshops, pad distribution drives, and research on sustainable menstrual products and waste management. Up to 3,000 beneficiaries have been reached, she says, girls, women and boys among them, along with Menstra's volunteers and the educational institution it partnered with. The count has grown since Menstra began sourcing and placing pads on a roll, in collaboration with Egal Pads, in places with high footfall: public schools, foster care homes, airports and cinemas among them. She puts the indirect reach at roughly 3,000 to 5,000 people, based on records and analytics from social media, from youth networks like CSW, Girl Up and Climate Fresk, and from coverage in the New York Times.
She is still running Menstra from New Delhi.