Collaborative plan to produce eco-friendly sanitary pads
The Hindu
French Consulate collaborates with NGO and ashram to establish eco-friendly menstrual pad manufacturing unit for women's empowerment.
The French Consulate has initiated a collaboration between a city NGO and an ashram in Kerala to explore establishing a manufacturing facility for eco-friendly and reusable menstrual pads for adolescent girls and women.
The Consulate has brought together the NGO Volontariat En Inde and the Annai Velangani orphange in the city and the Mata Amritanandamayi Math’s Amritapuri Ashram in Kerala, to advance the idea for a local production unit for the Saukhyam reusable sanitary pads—a symbol of the Amritapuri’s acclaimed success story in advancing women’s empowerment and menstrual hygiene.
The first batch of the highly absorbent napkins made of banana fibre were distributed to a group of users at a recent function hosted at the French Consulate.
The user group was also taken through the do’s and don’ts of washing these reusable pads by volunteers from Amritapuri.
“The idea (of a collaborative production venture) came about during one of our periodic visits to the Amritapuri Ashram in Kerala to offer consular assistance to the French citizens there”, said Lise Talbot Barre, French Consul General, whose jurisdiction spans Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
As she emphasised the three dimensions of the 25 years of the Indo-French strategic partnership that was based on friendship and trust — defence, civil nuclear energy and space; global environmental/climate change challenges and people-to-people partnership — Ms. Barre pointed out that France’s relations with Puducherry predated the with erstwhile Pondicherry administered by Francois Martin its first Governor General as far back as in the latter half of the 17th Century.
The Consul General considered the collaboration to popularise cost-effective and eco-friendly pads to be an important project that addressed the twin issues of women’s health and hygiene and environmental sustainability.
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