What Travelling Around India Taught Me About Menstrual Health.

Published: 2025

I took some time out to travel around India. If you have followed my work for a while, you will know that my passion for women's menstrual health and financial inclusion runs about equal with my passion for travel — especially solo travel, which I think everyone should try at least once.

So what did I learn, beyond the fact that India is completely overwhelming to all five senses at once — and yet, somehow, also grounding and warm, with a real sense of community and togetherness, often shared over a cup of chai?

A country of extraordinary scale and contradiction

India is now the most populous country in the world, having overtaken China, with around 1.4 billion people. That is an extraordinary concentration of possibility — and, yes, of market, because we live in a global economy. It is also a country of profound contradiction, where rapid modernisation sits alongside deeply held tradition.

Nowhere was that contradiction more visible to me than in the treatment of menstruation.

The reality of menstrual taboo

Menstruation remains taboo in many parts of India. Some temples do not allow menstruating women inside. In some communities, women are still isolated during their periods. These realities are well documented — if you want to understand more, I would recommend the Oscar-winning documentary ‘Period. End of Sentence’ on Netflix, which follows an incredible group of women working to change things in their own community.

But alongside the taboo, there is real momentum for change. The government has had a focus on women's empowerment for some time. And in very recent and significant news, India's Supreme Court has ruled that dignified menstrual health is part of the constitutional right to life, dignity, and education — directing states to provide free sanitary products and proper facilities in schools, and grounding the decision in the recognition that a lack of menstrual health provision converts a biological reality into a structural exclusion. Some Indian states have introduced paid menstrual leave. Others are debating it openly.

On paper, this is a genuine shift — from treating menstrual health as a welfare issue to recognising it as a matter of rights.

The gap between policy and lived experience

But through all my work and life experience, I have come to expect a persistent gap between policy or legal recognition and actual lived experience. India illustrates it clearly.

Pads distributed without education to go with them. Policies passed without the workplace empathy that would make them real. A focus on school-age girls that too often lets adult women and informal workers fade from view. My emphasis here is not either/or — it is that we need to do both. Legal recognition is necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own.

What I dream of — whether in India or anywhere else — is menstrual health becoming something deeply understood and genuinely respected in daily life, not just recognised in policy and then left to filter down unevenly. A law is a powerful start. But the goal is a culture where the law is lived, not just written.

What the trip gave me

It was an incredible trip. I learned a great deal, disconnected properly from my screen for once, found some genuinely special spiritual moments in Varanasi, and fed some cows for good karma. Solo travel through a country as intense as India strips away a lot of noise and leaves you with a clearer sense of what matters.

The work of closing the gap between menstrual health policy and menstrual health reality — in India, in the UK, everywhere — is exactly the kind of work that matters to me. Seeing it up close, in a context so different from my own, only sharpened that conviction. Would recommend the trip, and the reflection it forces, to anyone.