Kolkata: A voluntary organization started by graduates of Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to supply 1 million biodegradable sanitary pads to women in rural Jharkhand, eastern India.

“We are partnering with NGOs to distribute pads to women in urban slums and rural villages,” Kristin Kagetsu, co-founder and CEO of Saathi, told Indo-Asian News Service on January 12.

She says their target is deliver 1 million pads made from banana fiber in rural Jharkhand in a year.

Saathi (companion), based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is among the top 20 ventures featuring in the Tata Social Enterprise Challenge 2016-2017, a joint initiative by the Tata Group and the Indian Institute of Management – Calcutta. The national level challenge aims to find India’s most promising social enterprises.

Founded in 2014 by Kagetsu and colleagues Amrita Saigal and Grace Kane, the venture claims to be the first company to make biodegradable sanitary pads from banana fiber.

“We were driven by the fact that 275 million women in India can’t access pads because they are too expensive, scarcely available and difficult to discard,” Kagetsu explained.

With a production plant that is women-operated, the enterprise produces pads that are sustainable, highly-absorbent and non-toxic.

The company is mulling a soft launch for urban markets in 2017.

“We have not yet decided where to launch. As for the price, it will be cheaper than the commercially available ones,” Kristin added.

Saathi volunteers have found that in rural India, menstruating women often limit themselves from contributing to their communities simply because they lack access to affordable sanitary protection.

This prevents many rural girls and women to miss up to 50 days of work or school.

A report says that “inadequate menstrual protection makes adolescent girls (age group 12-18 years) miss 5 days of school in a month (50 days a year). Around 23 percent of these girls actually drop out of school after they started menstruating.”

Along with economic challenges, cultural stigmas prevent many women from easily accessing safe sanitary protection, especially in most rural Indian communities. The lack of access and proper sanitary hygiene can even lead to infections and even infertility.

To address the pressing healthcare issue, Saathi was founded by Kristin Kagetsu, Amrita Saigal, Grace Kane, Ashutosh Kumar and Zachary Rose. The aim was to develop a small scale manufacturing process that would produce affordable sanitary protection from waste banana tree fiber.