Bleeding at the Margins: Understanding Period Poverty among SC and ST Women Using Decomposition Analysis

Abstract

Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) women in India have relatively lower usage of period products than women of the General category. This paper attempts to understand and uncover the social factors explaining inequalities in the period product usage among these groups. This paper uses data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted in 2019–21, for this study, with a sample of 49,136 SC, 44,392 ST, and 41,045 General caste women in the age group of 15 to 24 years. Using the Fairlie decomposition method, we explain the inequalities in the period product usage between SC, ST, and general categories. Differences in wealth index (SC-Gen: 49.54%; ST-Gen: 46.6%), respondent’s education level (SC-Gen: 22.85%; ST-Gen: 17.3%), watching television (SC-Gen: 09.44%; ST-Gen: 10.1%), reading newspaper (SC-Gen: 08.71%; ST-Gen: 05.09%), and toilet facility (SC-Gen: 06.36%; ST-Gen: 03.05%) account for a large portion of the gap in the period product usage among these groups. Government, policymakers, and NGOs should focus on creating comprehensive menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) programmes, including educational programmes and mass media campaigns, while increasing focus on disadvantaged communities, viz. SCs and STs to make the necessary nudge for girls and women to adopt hygienic menstrual practices.

Keywords:

• Menstruation
• menstrual health
• and hygiene
• decomposition analysis
• inequality
• National Family Health Survey
• NFHS-5

Acknowledgements

The code is available upon request. Interested individuals can send a request to the corresponding author via email. We are immensely grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editor for their insightful comments that helped improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

NFHS data can be freely downloaded from the DHS website at the link:

https://dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm

Additional information

Funding

SPJIMR Regunath Research Fellowship in Social Citizenship and Management.