Meet the 27-year-old man raising awareness on menstrual hygiene in Hyd slums

27-year-old Odisha native Kamal Nayak speaks fluent Telugu that can put any Hyderabadi to shame, but it’s not something he learned to earn his bread and butter. Instead, it was because he left his plush job at a popular production house in Hyderabad to pursue a social cause that he says is very close to his heart.

Kamal is on a mission to educate and create awareness about menstrual hygiene. He is also the founder of Good Universe, an NGO that is working to educate people, irrespective of gender, in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh on the importance of sexual and reproductive health.

Kamal, a United Nations fellow for Sustainable Development, moved to Hyderabad in 2012 to work as a production crew member in the Nagarjuna film, Damarukam. Though the job paid him well, he realised he wasn’t cut out for the film industry.

“Having seen poverty close enough back at my hometown in Odisha, I left the job and joined ‘We Change You’, an NGO that created awareness on the ill-effects of alcoholism and smoking among industrial workers. For two years, I worked with a few other NGOs before I joined Osmania University to pursue my Bachelors degree in Social Work,” Kamal says.

Kamal Nayak

Having made up his mind to work towards social causes, Kamal says he still remembers the first day when he visited the slum behind Filmnagar, where a colony of rag-pickers lived. “I visited the slum every day for about a month but still remained an outsider for the residents,” Kamal shares.

Along with a few friends, Kamal began visiting homes at the slum, sharing meals and cups of tea with family members so they could get to know him better.

“We began talking to the women in the slum and they told us how there was a scarcity of drinking water and other basic amenities. During one such visit, I noticed inside a house that the woman was keeping a few pieces of cloth separate from the rest of the pile. This was a recurrent scene in many of the homes we visited. I didn’t have the first idea about the purpose it served, until one day I asked a woman what it was for. I got no reply. As soon as I exited the slum, my female colleagues scolded me for making the woman feel uncomfortable and asking her unwanted questions. It was only a day later that one of my friends said that the clothes were substitutes for sanitary napkins,” Kamal narrates.

Kamal became curious to understand more about the issue.

“Doctors made weird faces and found excuses because after all, it isn’t a man’s business to inquire about female reproductive health! Later on, in 2013, I finally met a female doctor who was ready to help and explained to me in detail what could help women living in the slums,” Kamal says.

Suspicious glances and taunts from elders were only the beginning of the arduous mission that Kamal took on. “Convincing the women to talk about their bodies to a bunch of young men and women was the most difficult one among the tasks,” he adds.

Many slums have an official head elected by its residents, but there is an unofficial leader who wields influence. “And thankfully, in our case, it was a woman, Leela. We managed to convince Leela about our mission and she gave us access to a small church where we held our first awareness class,” Kamal says.

Leela convinced the other women in the slum and the church became their gathering place. “It was then that I started slowly picking up Telugu so that I could talk not just to women who understood Hindi, but to the young and old alike,” Kamal adds.

Good Universe was founded two years later in 2016. In the last three years, Kamal and his team have visited slums in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and are spreading awareness not just among women but among men too.

“It’s a prevalent notion among both men and women to consider women impure while menstruating. This is aggravated in slums where there is an acute shortage of water and women are isolated and are branded as impure. Most of our awareness classes work on breaking such stereotypes and how women can keep themselves clean even in areas with scarce water,” Kamal explains.

Good Universe today holds awareness classes not just in slums, but in schools, corporate offices, colleges and orphanages. They also hold free medical camps, and Kamal says the doctors offer their services for free.

“And no matter the religious biases or conservative perceptions, we make sure men and women and girls and boys together attend our sessions. And to be honest, the level of acceptance is much higher among slum dwellers compared to the men and women in upper class settings. They have the desire to know more, accept the flaws and change for good,” Kamal adds.

In 2017, Good Universe won the social achiever award for their work in health and hygiene. Kamal was chosen as the UN fellow for Sustainable Development in the same year for his work on the impact of climatic change on women.

“It’s an ongoing project and if they find my work at par with their expectations, then the sky's the limit!” he adds.

Kamal and his team are now developing ways of creating sustainable hygiene, which encourages the use of menstrual cups over pads.

“It takes over 500 years to decompose a pad. And to imagine that these pads are sometimes segregated by workers with their bare hands is appalling. Cups can be cleaned and reused. We tested it among our team members and we started a green period campaign where we distributed over 1000 menstrual cups to women in slums," he says, adding, “Good Universe understands that women should be the catalyst of change in their own right. We have a dedicated helpline number to ensure every question is answered. We plan to create a huge community in Hyderabad where women can learn from each other. We already have reached 11,990 adolescent women across Andhra and Telangana.”