Three Class XII girls have started an online campaign to fight menstrual inequality and eradicate “period poverty” by giving sanitary pads to women who can’t afford them during the pandemic.

The girls have gone for crowdfunding and raised Rs 35,000. They approached professionals who conducted online workshops to help raise money for the campaign “Black Polythene”.

More than 10,000 sanitary pads will be given to women in Basirhat in North 24-Parganas and Patharpratima in South 24-Parganas through an organisation this week.

While the money is being raised to make sanitary pads available to women who don’t have the resources to use hygienic products and mostly make do with cloth, the three 17-year-olds want to break the taboo around menstruation where even urban women have to hide the fact they are menstruating or buy pads on the sly.

“When buying sanitary napkins or other forms of menstrual aid, women in our country feel the need to cover them in black polythene bags. This has led to these polythene bags being associated with the suppression of a process as natural as menstruation. By naming ourselves Black Polythene, we wish to create the opposite effect,” the girls have posted on their social media page.

Vidhi Mittal from La Martiniere for Girls, Muskan Choudhuri from Lakshmipat Singhania Academy and Aashna Agarwal from Modern High School for Girls started the campaign.

The three held a webinar and decided to collaborate as all wanted to work on menstrual hygiene.

“Rural women have limited affordability but many women in cities who have access to pads face a stigma and there is an underlying taboo associated with it,” Vidhi Mittal said. “There is no open conversation regarding this and about transmen who menstruate.”

The taboo around menstruation is there even in many urban homes, Muskan Choudhuri said. “Women are not supposed to enter the prayer room when they are menstruating. We want to raise questions against the rationale behind such thoughts.”

The social media campaign has pages like “Taking a pad to the bathroom shouldn’t feel like a heist” and “Can I get the sanitary napkin without the black polythene?”.

The money is being raised through multiple sources, one of which is approaching professionals in the city to conduct workshops. The girls hold live chats to spread the word about the campaign.

“We heard about women finding it difficult to get pads… they are struggling to make ends meet during the lockdown… let alone buy something for their own use. We wanted to reach out to them,” Aashna Agarwal said.