Chhitra Subramaniam
Film producer and co-founder, Pad Squad

During the pandemic, while civil society collectives and NGOs were involved in distributing food supplies to needy households, a group of enterprising individuals trained their lens on menstrual hygiene. On June 1, film producer Chhitra Subramaniam, entrepreneur Mayuri Joshi Dhavale, ad film director Surya Balakrishnan, filmmaker Devashish Makhija, producer Monica Raheja, actors Gillian Pinto, Taranjit Kaur and Niiya Kumar christened themselves the Pad Squad. Kaur and Subramaniam first went to the Siddharth Nagar slum in Andheri to distribute the pads. "When people noticed that we were going into a basti during a pandemic, it got attention," says Subramaniam.

The initiative has grown into a citizen's movement and spread to 26 cities, including Ranchi, Kolkata, Ghaziabad, Kalimpong, Shimla, Lucknow, Amritsar, Chennai and Indore. The squad now has over 60 members, including men. Each volunteer dips into his/her personal network to raise pads. Until now, they have distributed over half a million pads in India. "These are a bunch of fearless people who are going into communities not just to distribute, but also educate women on menstrual hygiene," says Subramaniam, who was also instrumental in providing vanity vans for the Mumbai police, especially women personnel, who don't have access to toilets and work on long shifts, during the lockdown.