Eco-friendly sanitary pads from banana fibre to be delivered in Jharkhand

Kolkata: Social enterprise Saathi, founded by three MIT graduates, aims to deliver one million biodegradable sanitary pads made from banana fibre to women in rural Jharkhand, its co-founder said here on Thursday.

"We are partnering with NGOs to distribute pads to women in urban slums and rural villages. The target as of now is to deliver one million pads in rural Jharkhand in a year," co-founder and CEO of Saathi Kristin Kagetsu told IANS here.

The Ahmedabad-headquartered Saathi is one of the top 20 ventures featuring in the Tata Social Enterprise Challenge (TSEC) 2016-2017.

TSEC is a joint initiative by the TATA Group and the Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta (IIM), a national level challenge to find India's most promising social enterprises.

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

"We were driven by the fact that 275,000,000 women in India can't access pads because they are too expensive, scarcely available and difficult to discard," said Kristin.

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.