Pataudi, Haryana: To help young girls navigate puberty – which is often a time of significant physical and emotional upheaval – C3 has been working in five schools of Pataudi district, Haryana. The initiative is supported by Open Text, and has been equipping over 1000 adolescent girls with life skills, digital and financial literacy, and information on menstrual health and hygiene.

C3 introduced an unique, first-of-its-kind resource – ‘Navya Kits’ – to the girls under this intervention. A collection of products and information that would help these young girls understand and manage their periods and dispel myths and taboos surrounding menstruation, these Navya Kits are a cornerstone for adolescent menstrual hygiene. The kits contain six reusable pads (that would last up to 2 years), a hot water bottle for menstrual pain management, a diary with interactive information on menstrual hygiene and taboos, and a detergent bottle that will help the girls wash and re-use their pads. To further supplement wider usage and safe disposal of sanitary napkins, C3 has also begun setting up incinerators in all of the five schools in which the initiative has been running.The Navya kits are also an essential tool for future advocacy around menstrual hygiene, and is something C3 will aim to disseminate through its other adolescent health initiatives as well.

At the launch event, Vandana Nair, Lead, Adolescent and Young People Program at C3, further emphasized the importance of educating young girls about menstrual hygiene, stating that “Menstruation is a natural bodily process that they will likely experience for several decades. By providing them with accurate information and resources, we can help them understand and manage their menstrual cycle and dispel any myths or taboos surrounding menstruation.”

Dr Tanaya Narendra, popularly known as Dr Cuterus, an Instagram influencer with over a million followers and author, was also present at the launch, and interacted directly with the young girls to answer their pressing concerns, to encourage them to have open conversations around menstruation, and providing valuable insights on how young girls can maintain their menstrual health. According to Dr. Cuterus, “this initiative by Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3) is absolutely unique, fun, and important for all the adolescent girls between the ages of 11-13. The products in the Navya kit will help young girls be prepared for their first period and also give them the right information in an engaging manner.”

Ms. Pushpanjali Saikia, CSR Lead India from Micro Focus now Open Text, reasserted the need to provide girls with all the necessary information to help them achieve both better health and future success. This includes digital literacy, larger emotional and physical wellbeing, and the confidence to seek out better opportunities and better life choices in today’s increasingly digitized world.

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Shalini Bharat, Director and Vice Chancellor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, to figure out the non-biomedical determinants and identify vulnerabilities underlying health issues.

Collaboration and partnership in healthcare
If you remember, SDG 17 (Sustainable Development Goal) is about collaborations and partnerships, and I think in healthcare, more than anywhere else, collaborations and partnerships matter. Today, all of us probably complement each other’s characteristics or competencies, and the problems are so unique and complex that one size does not fit all. Similarly, one solution also will not bring the kind of results desired. and therefore, we need to build multiple partners onto the same platform. The other issue that requires us to bring a partner is that we have recognised that most issues, including all diseases, have not just a biomedical side to them but also a non-biomedical side to them, which means that we bring social dimensions. These are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary focuses, along with a medical approach. We need to work in teams. I think it is very important and critical to work in multidisciplinary teams and to work in a collaborative way.

Need for social counselling in healthcare
If we look at the TB issue, we recognise today that, despite treatment being available, we have not been able to control TB as a problem in the country. In fact, India has almost one-fourth of the world’s TB burden. and that is because in the last several years we have only seen this as a bio-medical problem. Now, increasingly, we have realised that we need to understand that people had multiple issues before they had TB or as a result of TB. They have this problem, but they also lose employment at times, they fall into the poverty bracket, there is a huge stigma around the disease, and then there is the gender dimension: men have different consequences, but women have and face different consequences. There is a great deal of need for counselling to be done here. And counselling is not just about taking care of psychosocial issues but also linking them to health services, other government schemes, and so on. And all this requires that we work alongside biomedical providers. But then there are those that can provide psychosocial care; we also need to bring in community leaders; we also need to bring in peer members, that is, those who have survived TB, and they become champions and provide peer-based counselling. So this is one great example, and this is now happening in India.

Collaboration in TB care
From our own example, we know that, as an academic institution, we are providing support to the government, that is, the Central TB Division, in the form of providing trained psycho-social counsellors, providing training for them, and being able to look at drug-resistant TB as one of the issues. In four states, we are providing psychosocial care and counselling to drug-resistant TB cases. In addition to that, we are also finding that public-private providers are also collaborating in TB care.

Tata Inst. of Social Sciences
The Tata Institute of Social Sciences is a community-engaged university and India’s premier social science university. We have four campuses: Mumbai, Hyderabad, Tuljapur, which is a rural campus, and Guhati, in the northeast. This institute started as an institute for the professional training of social workers, but in the last several years we have grown to more than 50 PG programmes, four robust UG programmes, and 18 PhD programmes. And I think this is one of the only universities that has applied social science as its focus, and we have almost seven thousand students at this point in time, along with a school of vocational education. So a very multi-disciplinary social science university