When the girls in Mumbai’s Cathedral and John Connon School started their new academic year last week, they found a pleasant surprise waiting for them: the ladies’ toilets now had a sanitary napkin dispenser.
The idea and execution wasn’t something the school’s management was directly responsible for: it was the work of three class XII students, Devika Malhotra, Malini Dasgupta, and Aditi Arya. They thought up the whole thing when they were members of an extracurricular club at the school, the Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship club. The brief was to solve everyday problems, and the trio came up with the concept of a dispenser in the girls’ bathrooms.
Though they left the club in October — “Every semester we have to start a new club,” Devika says — they continued to work on the idea with the help of CuriosityGym, which facilitates design innovation and runs the club. “We kept working on this idea because we really wanted to make a difference,” Devika says.
“Every girl in the class immediately said it was great, and we needed it,” Malini says, “This was a much-needed solution. Currently, if a girl gets her period, she has to go down three floors to the office to get a pad, unless she has one.”
In April, after working on prototypes, and learning about design in the process, they set up a dispenser that was ready and waiting when the academic year began. The dispenser, 3-D printed, has a coil and light sensor that detects and accepts ₹10 notes and releases a sanitary pad.
This sort of facility is rare even in private schools, but the three inventors don’t want to stop at that. While they do want to expand the initiative to other private schools, they want to first fix the problem for less affluent municipal schools as well.
So they began an online fund-raiser on Riizr.com a fortnight ago, which raised $2,700 (just over ₹1.74 lakh), $700 above their goal requirement. Rather than spend the money manufacturing their own design, which would take time and be expensive, they decided to source machines from manufacturers. The girls are now waiting for their order to reach them, so that they can install them at 13 municipal schools in Mumbai. “We all really need this,” Devika says, “but girls in public schools need it the most. They often have to miss school on their period.”
