Rethinking menstrual health in India: will tax-free napkins be the real solution?

With the GST Council deciding to tax sanitary napkins, menstrual hygiene has become a hot topic of discussion. However, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and his team have come in for widespread criticism for overlooking an involuntary process like menstruation and putting an essential accessory like sanitary napkins under luxury products when deciding tax rates.

Though a 12 percent tax on napkins has been mandated under the Goods and Services Tax (GST), it is not much of a relief from the earlier rate of up to 14.5 percent. While sindoor and other pooja items have been made tax free, the decision to continue taxing napkins is deemed irrational by many, including celebrities and politicians.

Concerns regarding tax on napkins

Dubbing the decision to tax sanitary napkins as absolutely “unfair”, MP Sushmita Dev says she cannot understand why no mind was applied with regard to issues surrounding the use of napkins. “There are enough studies to directly suggest that the major reasons for non-utilisation of napkins by women in India are either related to affordability or stigma. Taxing a biological process like menstruation takes away the fundamental right of women,” she says.

Arunachalam Muruganantham from Coimbatore, who was first credited with innovating a low-cost sanitary napkin machinery way back in 2006, also describes GST Council's move as “foolish”. “I do not think a complete tax ban on napkins would incur huge revenue losses for the government. They are giving more importance to symbolic items like sindoor which has no direct impact on the health and well-being of a woman." He adds,

"I mean you cannot have real women empowerment when young menstruating girls still miss school for six days a month in rural India."

Fixing such a high tax rate for sanitary napkins seems to defy rational explanation. “Sanitary napkins are levied an indirect tax but I still cannot understand the enormous 12 percent. If the government can take a hit from making movies like Dangal tax-free, why not completely abolish taxes on sanitary napkins and compensate,” asks Dev, who campaigned extensively for the cause through her online petition.

“Now they say it’s 12 percent, but GST is like a ghost and since the tax levied on napkins is an indirect one, it could well spiral up to 20 percent. So, it’s again a ritual of unreasonable high taxation which is least empathetic on the part of the central government and the GST panel,” says Muruganantham.

A probable explanation for the high tax rate could be that the government already has a mechanism in place to provide subsidised napkins under the National Rural Health Mission scheme. However, Dev is skeptical about their quality. “Though this public sector initiative is laudable, there’s no quality control over these napkins and most of them remain unused. And the government fails to ensure last-mile delivery,” she says.

Nonetheless, would making sanitary napkins more affordable solve all problems related to menstrual hygiene management in India? “I doubt that,” says Sharmada Shastry, who has worked extensively in the field of adolescent health with the organisation Pasand.

Menstrual awareness in India

“Awareness of menstrual health in India is very poor. And I see no urban-rural divide in such a pattern. There is enough misconception and wrong information among working women also. Since it’s not mandatory in our curricula there’s no concerted effort in teaching young girls about the bodily manifestations that accompany menstruation. They are just taught how to handle it when they first get their periods,” says Sharmada.   

Though she condemns the taxation move from a feminist point of view, she is uncertain whether a complete tax ban on napkins would solve the issues at hand. “Yes, every woman should be given to access to it, but there’s more to this problem. The real task relates to the cultural taboo and the lack of knowledge about the proper use of menstrual pads, both napkins and cloth pads.”

Recalling an interesting episode from one of her menstrual health awareness sessions with schoolgirls, Sharmada says, “Just after I tried convincing young girls about the cheap and easy accessibility of cloth pads, the teacher present in the class added his bit by saying that using cloth pads over expensive napkins would reduce the burden on their parents who also have to save for their weddings.”

“I was taken aback with the teacher’s patriarchal statement. I mean this only shows how deep-seated the taboo about menstruation is in our cultural landscape. So any change that is targeted towards this has to be slow, systemic, and positive one. We can’t do this one protest or one debate at a time,” adds Sharmada.

She also trashes the oft-cited study by A.C. Nielsen which states that only 12 percent of India’s 335 million menstruating women can afford sanitary napkins. More recent data from the National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), 2015-16 states that the percentage of women aged between 15 and 24 years who use hygienic methods of protection during their menstrual cycles in India stands at an overall 57.6 percent (77.5 percent in urban areas and 48.2 percent in rural India). The survey gathered information from 601,509 households, 699,686 women and 103,525 men across the country.

Overview

But concerns remain over issues related to access, awareness, and disposability of menstrual hygiene products. Under the NHRM scheme, rural girls are provided up to six napkins at subsidised rates every month. However, their prolonged use might leave them prone to vaginal infections, an issue that remains unaddressed. As for awareness, a UNICEF study shows that about 83 percent of Indian girls had no idea what to expect when they started bleeding. Even those using traditional cloth pads at the onset of puberty were hesitant to wash and dry them in sunlight, which is necessary to ward off infections. 

According to Sharmada, the massive waste footprint that used sanitary napkins are leaving behind in urban landfills is also almost never spoken about. Cast-off sanitary napkin waste can take up to 800 years to decompose. "Disposable products which ease discomfort can sure be a quick fix solution, but our policymakers need to consider the sustainability factor more seriously because distributing free napkins doesn’t always lead to better menstrual health,” says Sharmada.

So who wins and who loses in this high tax rate scenario? The obvious winners would be the big pharmacy companies. The losers will be all the rural girls who would start skipping school again due to their monthly periods. But the GST ruling on taxation of napkins is a much smaller battle compared to the mammoth challenges of dealing with menstrual health and hygiene in one of the most populous democracies of the world.