Running became the latest sell for Menstrual Hygiene awareness

After formally-trained Sani Warriors and the Delhi government’s Period Fest and Pad Yatra, the realm of Menstrual Hygiene gets more peculiar. At least two ‘marathons’ believe running is an effective ‘tool’ for menstrual hygiene awareness: Veera Di Pad-O-Thon and Run4Niine.

Last Sunday, over a thousand runners traversed 1-6 kms for the Pad–O–Thon in Mumbai. It  was flagged off by Dr. Bharati Lavekar, MLA, Versova who also happens to be the founder of TEE Foundation. The foundation joined hands with IndusInd Bank for the 2nd edition of ‘Veera Di Pad-O-Thon’, positioned as a marathon dedicated to create awareness about sanitary hygiene.

The theme for this year’s Pad-O-Thon was ‘Run for the Women We Love’ and aims to facilitate distribution of sanitary napkins to over 3,500 female students adopted by the foundation across 52 municipality schools. The funds raised through the Pad-O-Thon will be utilised in the installation of sanitary pad vending machines.

Meanwhile, Bollywood star and India’s ‘Pad Man’ Akshay Kumar will join forces with the Niine Sanitary Napkins for Run4Niine, which will take place in hundreds of cities across India on the 8th March 2019 to mark International Women’s Day. With Runs taking place in Lucknow, Gurgaon, Ludhiana, Mumbai, Amritsar, Jaipur, Kolkata, Goa and several other cities across India, it’s going to be a big show.

Here’s a video of ‘Pad Man’ Akshay Kumar calling on ‘Pad Heroes’ to join him. The word coinage for the Menstrual Hygiene movement gets more and more bizarre each day. What next, Pad-Ma-Laxmi?

Of course, Niine is a brand of affordable yet premium sanitary napkins, co-founded by Amar Tulsiyan from Gorakhpur and Gaurav Bathwal and Kanpur entrepreneur Sharat Khemka. Ironically, their anti-cloth rhetoric is the opposite of what menstrual health activists in the West are championing: environmentally friendly and organic menstrual products like reusable cloth pads (which Indian women used traditionally before synthetic pads came into the market).

We leave it to you to figure the commercials involved.

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