Conversations around menstrual health have steadily moved from the margins to the mainstream, emerging as a critical development priority linked to education, gender equality, public health, and community wellbeing. While corporate social responsibility has played a significant role in expanding access to menstrual hygiene initiatives, the sector is increasingly recognising that meaningful progress demands far more than one time product distribution. Sustainable impact lies in creating systems that address awareness, behaviour, infrastructure, institutional ownership, and long term accountability.
In this interview with TheCSRUniverse, Mr. Arun Gupta, Founder and President of Pinkishe Foundation, discusses why menstrual health interventions must evolve into multi year ecosystem building programmes that place outcomes above outreach numbers. He shares how Pinkishe Foundation has integrated grassroots engagement, technology, governance, community ownership, and regulated social finance to build scalable and transparent models that strengthen menstrual dignity. Gupta also reflects on the changing expectations of CSR funders, the promise of the Social Stock Exchange, and the importance of collaborative action between corporates, governments, and civil society to ensure that no girl is denied education or opportunity because of her periods.
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Q. Menstrual health has increasingly found a place within CSR portfolios, yet implementation often remains fragmented. In your view, what should distinguish a meaningful, long-term menstrual health intervention from a conventional CSR distribution drive?
A. You are right that menstrual health has come a long way. Ten years ago, very few people in the corporate world would even discuss it openly. The fact that it now sits in serious CSR portfolios is real progress, much of it driven by the very leaders who will read this. So I say what follows with gratitude for that shift, not criticism. And I will be candid, because when we started, we were part of the fragmentation ourselves.
We would go into a community, distribute pads, and conduct an awareness camp. It had real value. Lakhs of girls learned about their own bodies, and the shyness around menstruation began to lift. But then someone asked me a simple question: can you show me what actually changed? And I had no answer. We had reached lakhs of girls, but we had never once gone back to them. We had assumed change. We had not seen it. That, for me, is where the line falls. A drive is a product. A real intervention is an ecosystem. Distribution matters, but on its own it solves very little, because menstrual health is tied to awareness, shame, school attendance, toilets, safe disposal, teacher support, family attitudes, and a girl's confidence to speak when she needs help. A conventional drive ends with one camp and one packet of pads. A real programme begins there, and keeps asking harder questions. Did the girl actually understand her body? Is she using a product safely? Is there somewhere in her school where she can get a pad on the day she needs it? Does she know how to dispose of it with dignity?But the deepest questions are not only about the girl. They are about everyone around her. Are her teachers comfortable supporting her instead of looking away? Are boys being brought into the conversation, so that a boy who understands today becomes a man who respects tomorrow? Are fathers and brothers part of it, and not only mothers? A girl does not menstruate in isolation. She lives inside a family, a school, and a community whose attitudes decide whether she feels shame or feels safe. You can teach a girl everything, but if the world around her still treats menstruation as something dirty and unspoken, very little changes. A drive never has to touch any of this. A programme lives or dies by it.
It is also important to be plain about why the sector remains fragmented. CSR funding naturally clusters around a company's operating geographies, while some of the deepest needs are in districts that are harder to reach. Real transformation in such places requires commitment over years, which is far more difficult than a single drive. We see the cost of this most sharply in hardware. Vending machines are installed and then forgotten, with no training, no maintenance, and nobody assigned even to refill them. Incinerators are placed, but no one is taught to use them. Money is spent, but without a system around it, the girl still does not benefit.
I also want to be clear that this is not about the size of a contribution. If a partner comes to us with a smaller fund, my honest advice is always the same: choose a small geography and stay with it for the long term, rather than spreading the same money thinly across a one-time drive. I would far rather see fifty girls in one small home supported steadily for years than a thousand girls touched once with a packet and a single session. A modest fund placed inside a proper system, with training and ownership around it, can do lasting good. It is spending without a system, at any scale, that goes to waste. Some of our most valued partnerships began exactly this way, with a smaller fund and a real intent to see something through.
So the difference, in one line, is this: a drive asks how many pads were handed out. A programme asks what changed in a girl's life. One is an event, captured in a few photographs. The other is built in partnership, owned by the community, and judged by what it leaves behind. From an event. To a project. To a programme. To a true transformation.
Q. As corporate philanthropy evolves from cheque-writing to outcome-driven partnerships, what shifts have you observed in the expectations of CSR funders, and how has Pinkishe Foundation adapted its approach to meet these changing demands?
A. I have seen the shift on both sides, among smaller funders and the largest ones, and it has gone in three clear directions.
The first shift is in how funders think about money itself. For years, the instinct was to reach the maximum number of people at the lowest possible cost, and to push operational costs down as far as possible. The problem is that this quietly forces an NGO to cut corners, and finally it is the girl on the ground who pays for that false economy, in a programme that looks large on paper but changes little in her life. What I am seeing now, among smaller and larger funders alike, is a wiser view. A smaller CSR funder may not always afford a full baseline and endline study of their own, so instead of buying the widest reach at the lowest price, they have started looking for NGOs they can trust to do the work properly. And the more serious funders have understood something important, that a real programme needs real capacity inside the NGO, the right people, the right thinking, and the time to build something that works. They have become prudent without becoming penny-wise, and many are now willing to support that capacity, because they can see that this is what makes the outcome real. Trust, and a fair understanding of what good work actually costs, has become the currency.
The second shift is especially visible among the larger players. Many companies now have serious, experienced CSR teams, people who have worked on the ground, across sectors, geographies and many implementation partners. They know the subject. And for their boards, it is no longer enough that an activity happened. It must create impact, and that impact must sustain after we leave. So the relationship has become genuinely collaborative. With some of our larger partners, we are in regular contact through the month, with reviews that go beyond the numbers into what is actually changing on the ground, steering meetings with senior management, and open conversations about what is working and what is not. That is a very different world from the old model, where a funder wrote a cheque and waited for a report.
The third shift is perhaps the most important. The tolerance for poorly designed or poorly managed programmes has reduced sharply. Earlier there was sometimes an unspoken comfort that this is social work, that behaviour change is hard, and that if something does not fully work, it is acceptable. That has changed. Neither side wants to see money wasted now. And companies have a fair concern. If a programme is left poorly managed after the funded period, with their brand on a vending machine that no longer works, it does not just fail a girl, it damages their name. That worry has pushed everyone towards building things that last, which I think is healthy for the whole sector. At the same time, the best funders have matured in another way. They want honesty more than they want a perfect story. They understand that social change is never a straight line, and that a partner who reports a setback truthfully is worth far more than one who only ever shows success. That kind of trust, where we can tell each other what is not working, is what actually helps a programme improve.
As for how Pinkishe has adapted, the honest answer is that these expectations forced us to grow up as an institution, and we did it on several fronts.
First, we changed what we build. We stepped away from covering the widest possible audience with a single combined session, and moved towards deeper, multi-year transformation in a chosen geography, through a model we call Shakti Shala. It may mean fewer girls in a year, but it allows real and lasting change, and it gives a funder a programme they can follow over time. I will gladly come to how that model works, because it is a story in itself.
Second, we changed how we prove our work. We strengthened our baseline and endline understanding, our field documentation, our review systems and our regular reporting. And in some programmes, impact has been reviewed through independent assessors appointed by the funders themselves. That matters, because a funder should be able to hear about the impact from someone other than the organisation asking for the money.
Third, we changed how funders can see our work. We brought in technology, including IoT-enabled machines and live dashboards, so that partners can see progress, and gaps, far more transparently. Confidence should not depend only on a monthly report. It should be built into the system itself. I will come to how that works, because it deserves its own answer.
And we are pushing ourselves further still. A three-year programme gives us the chance to move beyond outputs, and even outcomes, towards deeper impact. Did absenteeism actually reduce? Did a girl's confidence improve? Did the school become more supportive? I will be honest that we are still on this road, not at its end. In many districts, even basic baseline data does not yet exist in a usable form. But that is exactly where we are putting our effort, because a funder deserves to know that their money led to something that truly matters.
Underneath all of this, the core has not changed. It is still about the dignity of a single girl. What has changed is the depth, the structure and the accountability we now bring to that same mission.
Q. Pinkishe Foundation combines grassroots execution with technology, governance, and community ownership. How do these elements work together to create a model that is both socially impactful and institutionally scalable?
A. Let me answer this through how Shakti Shala actually runs, because for us grassroots execution, technology, governance and community ownership are not four separate features. They are four answers to one hard question. How do you take something as deep and personal as menstrual transformation, make it work at scale, and keep it working after you have gone?
The first thing I would say is that the programme is modular by design. The same model can be scaled down to a single school, for a smaller funder or a focused intervention, and it can also be scaled up into a multi-district programme. It repeats in the same shape at different sizes, and that is deliberate. It matters because menstrual health cannot be allowed to depend on a founder, one strong field worker, or one enthusiastic principal. The model itself has to be strong enough to travel.
It is also why we focus on the places that need this most. Four of the six districts we already work in are among the Government of India's aspirational districts, the ones the government itself has identified as most in need. We have delivered the model across these six districts with our CSR partners, and we are now extending it into a new district, Sarangarh in Chhattisgarh, through our Social Stock Exchange issue. Our intent is to keep going deeper into such underserved districts, one committed partnership at a time.
It begins with grassroots execution. We do not believe in parachuting into a community with ready-made answers. In every school we identify a teacher who is willing to take ownership of menstrual health, and we identify girls who become our Sakhis, our school champions. Wherever possible, the people who train and mobilise the community are drawn from the same district or region. They know the language, the customs, the hesitations, the unspoken rules. The community sees them as their own, so trust comes faster. We are not imposing a conversation from outside. We are helping the community build it from within.
What makes this possible to repeat is the way the team itself is structured. On the ground we hire and train local people from the geography we are serving. Above them are coordinators, and above that a central project management team that tracks what is working, compares learning across districts, and carries those lessons into the next geography. So when we open a new district, we are not starting from zero. We bring the same processes, the same training material, the same monitoring systems and the same programme discipline, but the face and the voice of the programme remain local. In that sense the model replicates itself while staying rooted in local hands. That is the real reason it can scale without losing its soul.
The next piece is that we deliberately connect the model with the government system, not around it. The district administration, education officers, school principals, teachers, and health workers such as ASHAs and ANMs are all important parts of the ecosystem. We build their capacity, hold regular reviews, and create recognition so that good work is visible and people stay motivated. This matters because the more the system itself owns the programme, the less it depends on Pinkishe, and the more locations it can support at the same time. Technology then ties the work together. I will keep this brief because it deserves its own answer, but the key point is that technology is placed directly in the hands of the grassroots team. A local worker can capture data, feedback, photographs and field updates from the school itself, and it reaches the central team without loss. IoT-enabled machines and dashboards help us track access, usage, refill needs and gaps. This means that one central team can keep a clear eye on a large number of schools, without having to be physically present everywhere. Governance is the discipline that allows all of this to run consistently. For one school, goodwill may be enough. For fifty or a hundred schools, you need defined roles, standard processes, delegation, reviews and financial discipline, supported by a strong board and external audits. Otherwise everything rests on individual effort. Good governance is what makes the model dependable for our partners and fair to the community, so that the same standard is delivered whether we are working in one school or across several districts. And community ownership is the test of everything else. We know the model has worked when our presence is no longer the thing holding it up. When the teacher knows what to do, the Sakhi feels confident, the machine is being refilled, the health worker is part of the conversation, the principal reviews it, and a girl knows exactly where to go for help, menstrual health has started to become part of the school's normal functioning. That, for us, is the real meaning of scalability. Not simply that Pinkishe is present in more places, but that more places are able to carry menstrual dignity forward without depending on us every day.
Q. Your flagship programme, Shakti Shala, follows a three-year ‘Start–Strengthen–Sustain’ framework rather than a one-off intervention. Why is sustained ecosystem-building essential for addressing menstrual health, particularly in underserved districts?
A. Menstrual health is not a problem you can solve in a single day, because the thing you are really working against is centuries of silence. The taboos, the myths, the shame, these were built over generations. They do not lift because you held one good event. Even if you change things for one girl, even if you make her aware, her transformation is still incomplete if the world around her has not changed with her. Her confidence has nowhere to stand. That is why we built Shakti Shala as a three-year Start, Strengthen, Sustain framework, with each year doing a different job.
The first year is about laying a safe foundation. We work with school teachers, ASHA workers, girls, and women from the community. We install the vending machines, provide access to pads, build basic menstrual health understanding, and create the first set of Sakhis, our girl champions. This year is deliberately centred on girls and women first, because they need a foundation of confidence and safety before the wider community is brought in.
The second year is when we widen the circle. This is the year we deliberately bring in men and boys. That sequencing is a conscious choice, not an afterthought. We move beyond the classroom into the community through cycle rallies, wall paintings, public events and wider conversations, so that fathers, brothers and boys are no longer outside the subject but slowly become a source of support around the girl.
This is also the year when the first set of Sakhis begins passing the baton to a new set. We watch that handover carefully, because it is the first real test of whether the change can carry itself. It is also the year we look honestly at what is still holding girls back. Where clean toilets, water or school infrastructure are part of the problem, we work with and advocate to the district administration, even where the sanitation work itself is not ours to deliver. And we recognise the teachers and schools doing the best work, because recognition keeps motivation high and makes others want to follow.
The third year is a different story altogether. Everything from the first two years continues, but now the focus shifts to handover. The education department and district administration must begin to own the system themselves. A good example is pad supply. From the first year, we provide pads that are compatible with the vending machines, but the supply is still ours. By the third year, the goal is for the district administration, which is used to procuring branded pad packets, to instead procure and supply these pads directly to the schools. That single shift, where the government system takes over supply in a sustainable form, tells you that the model is beginning to take root. I also want to be honest about where we are on this. We have not yet completed a full three-year cycle. Our furthest programme is in its second year. The first two years are showing us what we hoped to see, but the third year, the true handover year, is still ahead of us. We know it will bring challenges we have not met yet, and we will learn from them. But that, to me, is exactly why a three-year commitment matters, and why short funding cycles fail menstrual health. The hardest and most important year is the last one. That is the year when the work either takes root in the system or quietly falls away once we leave.
The whole point of building the ecosystem slowly is that on the day Pinkishe walks out, the administration continues the supplies, the schools keep using the model, the teachers and Sakhis keep the conversation alive, the data continues to be reviewed, and menstrual health has simply become a normal part of how that school runs.
Q. Technology is often associated with efficiency, but Pinkishe has used IoT-enabled pad vending machines and live monitoring dashboards to improve accountability. How has technology changed the way CSR-funded social programmes can be monitored, evaluated, and trusted?
A. I would gently reframe the question, if I may. For much of the sector, technology has changed how programmes are monitored and trusted. But for us it was never a sudden change. It has been part of our foundation from day one. I come from twenty years in the technology industry, and we built Pinkishe as a technology-led organisation from the start. The specific tools have grown over time, and that growth has made our programmes more scalable and more systematic, but the instinct to run this work on data was there before the first school.
Let me give you the clearest example. We now use IoT-enabled vending machines that can be tracked. Earlier, there was no reliable way to know whether a machine in a remote school was working, or whether pads were actually reaching girls when they needed them. The best we could do was call the school after a month or two, which took enormous effort, and even then the answer might be accurate or it might not. Today, sitting in Delhi, I can see that girls are drawing pads continuously in a school, and that single fact tells me a real part of the programme is alive and working on the ground. That is what I mean when I say technology has made us more systematic. It replaced a phone call we could not fully trust with a truth we can see.
The first thing it changes is trust. For years, the honest difficulty with social programmes was that a funder had to take the NGO's word. We said we reached so many girls and distributed so many pads, and they had limited ways to verify the depth of that work. That is no longer how it works with us. Our vending machines are part of a pad management system, and every pad dispensed is recorded. We can see consumption patterns school by school, block by block. If a machine is barely being used in one school, the data tells us to go and ask why. Is it locked? Are the girls hesitant? Is the teacher not oriented? Is it placed wrong? Technology does not only show us success, it helps us find the gaps early enough to fix them. And the dashboard is open to our partners through controlled access, so a funder does not wait for a monthly summary. They can see progress, and gaps, much closer to real time. Opening our live data like this is a bigger step than it looks, because it says we are confident enough, and clean enough, to be watched in real time, with nothing to backfill and nothing to hide.
It also eases one of the quiet frictions in this sector. CSR teams are stretched, and often feel they are forever asking NGOs for reports, while NGOs can feel buried under those demands. When a partner can see much of the programme directly, that tension falls away. The relationship stops being about chasing paperwork and starts being a conversation about what the data is telling us and how we improve the work.
The second thing it changes is accountability across the whole ecosystem. We do not want the dashboard to be only a donor-facing tool. Wherever possible we bring the district administration and the relevant government stakeholders into the same view, through shared access. There should not be one version of reality for the funder and another for the government. The funder, the administration and the team on the ground should all be looking at the same truth. That shared visibility gives everyone a stake. A teacher handles her responsibility knowing the district can see the work, and the programme becomes something the whole ecosystem owns and watches together, not something Pinkishe merely reports on.
But the third direction matters most to me, because it is easy to let technology become only a tool for reassuring donors. The most important piece of technology we have is not the dashboard. It is a simple telephone helpline. Every girl in our programme has access to her teacher and her local coordinator, people she may know personally. But we also give her an anonymous helpline she can call on her own. She does not have to give her name. She can share as much or as little as she wishes. She can call about a machine that is not working, about needing supplies, or about something she is frightened to say aloud to anyone with a face. And for serious health concerns, we have access to doctors who can guide her appropriately. That is technology pointed not upward at the funder, but downward at the girl, protecting her dignity at the exact moment she needs it. So when people ask how technology has changed these programmes, my honest answer is that for the sector it has changed a great deal, but for us it has always been the way we work. What it does, every day, is three things at once. It makes the work more efficient, it makes it transparent enough for the whole ecosystem to trust it, and it makes care reach a girl even when no one is standing beside her. But I hold one caution very strongly. Technology must never replace the human being. The data and the alerts inform our judgement, they do not replace it. Behind every number there is a coordinator who reviews it, a teacher who acts on it, and sometimes a person who still has to sit beside a frightened girl and reassure her. Technology has made us more efficient and more accountable, but never less human.
Q. Pinkishe is among the few non-profits leveraging the NSE Social Stock Exchange as a fundraising pathway. How do you see regulated social finance transforming philanthropic giving in India, and what message would you like to convey to corporate donors and HNIs who are considering this route?
A. I think something has been changing across the whole social sector, and changing for the better. The words we now hear again and again are impact, scale, sustainability, and transformation. The sector is slowly moving from good intentions towards demonstrated results, and that needs serious, capable organisations willing to put themselves under real scrutiny. The Social Stock Exchange is one of the most important steps in that direction. I do not see it as just another fundraising platform. I see it as a trust-based fundraising platform. For perhaps the first time, the discipline and scrutiny of the financial markets is being brought to the social sector in such a structured way, and that is a powerful thing.
These are still early days. But I believe that in the years to come, the Social Stock Exchange will allow credible organisations to raise large funds for meaningful social programmes, with a level of monitoring, disclosure and transparency that the sector has not had in this form before. That is exactly what everyone says they want, the CSR teams, the philanthropists, the HNIs, and civil society organisations themselves.
I would gently point out something to funders. India has a very large number of registered non-profits, but only a limited number have taken the Social Stock Exchange route so far, and fewer still have reached the stage of listing an issue. Why? Because it asks an organisation to be brave. It asks you to open yourself to a regulator, to disclose more, to be measured more closely, and to accept public scrutiny. The organisations that step forward on this route are choosing a harder road because they believe in transparency. To my mind, that courage deserves to be recognised and supported. If corporate India and our philanthropists put even a small portion of their giving through this channel, they will not only fund good work, they will help an entire trustworthy ecosystem take root. I should also be honest about what this route is, because honesty is the whole point of it. The instrument we have brought to the exchange is a Zero Coupon Zero Principal instrument. In plain terms, the donor receives no money back and no financial return. This is philanthropy, not investment. What the donor receives instead is something an ordinary donation may not always provide in the same structured way, the assurance of a regulated platform, detailed disclosures, disciplined reporting, and stronger visibility on how the funds are used and what they achieve. For us, this is not a leap of faith that donors are taking on an unknown organisation. We have gone through the discipline of the Social Stock Exchange process, our fundraising documents and disclosures have been examined on the exchange, and we are now in the advanced stages of that process. That scrutiny is real, and we have welcomed it, because it reflects the transparency we have tried to practise from day one. There is one more thing this route does, and it means a great deal to me. Menstrual health was neglected for years because it was treated as too private, too uncomfortable, or too small a subject to take seriously. Bringing it onto a regulated exchange, with structured disclosures and measurable outcomes, says something important. It says this is not a small charity matter. It is a serious issue of public health, education, gender and dignity, and it deserves structured, accountable investment like any other major social priority.
So my message to corporate donors and to HNIs is simple. A few organisations have already taken the first step onto this platform. The time has come for corporate India and India's philanthropists to take that step too. Not because the return is financial, but because this is how we build something the country has long needed, a way of giving that is large in scale, serious in intent, and beyond question in trust.
Q. Your proposed Social Stock Exchange issue aims to support a menstrual health programme across 100 government schools, reaching 20,000 adolescent girls and 5,000 community women in Sarangarh, Chhattisgarh. Beyond these outreach figures, which qualitative or systemic outcomes will determine whether the project has truly succeeded?
A. Those numbers matter, and I do not want to wave them away. Reaching 20,000 girls and 5,000 women is the scale at which a district can begin to shift. But I will be honest, the numbers are the easy part. You can reach 20,000 girls and change very little, or you can reach them and transform the place. What separates the two is everything the numbers do not show.
So when you ask me how I will know Sarangarh has truly succeeded, I do not look first at the count. I look at four things. The first is the girl herself. Success, for me, is a girl who no longer stays at home for those few days every month, whose attendance begins to look normal, and whose confidence begins to return. It is a girl who can say the word, who can raise the subject in her own classroom without dropping her eyes, and who knows her body is not something to be ashamed of. If 20,000 girls are reached but they are still missing school and still silent, we have failed, however good the photographs look.
The second is the world around her, because we learned long ago that you cannot change a girl in isolation. Success is boys who treat menstruation as ordinary rather than something to mock. It is teachers who support a girl instead of looking away. It is fathers and brothers who are no longer outside the conversation. When the people around her change, her change finally has somewhere to stand.
The third is the community owning it themselves. In Sarangarh, success looks like the 5,000 women we work with no longer waiting for Pinkishe for every step. They manage supplies, carry the knowledge forward, support younger girls, and become the people the next girl turns to. The day the community can keep this alive without depending on us every day is the day the programme has begun to work.
And the fourth, which to me is the highest measure of all, is the system taking it over. The real test of Sarangarh will not be only what Pinkishe does there. It will be whether, by the end, the district administration and the education department treat menstrual health as their own responsibility. Whether they keep watching the data. Whether the administration, which is used to buying branded pad packets, begins supporting the supply needs of these schools itself. When the government system carries it forward without us holding every piece together, the change has become permanent. And that is the only kind of success worth raising money for.
So yes, we will count the schools, the girls, and the women, because a funder deserves to know the scale of what their support reached. But the figures are the door, not the room. What truly tells me Sarangarh has succeeded is quieter and harder to photograph, a girl in school on a day she would once have stayed home, a community that no longer waits for us, and a district that has made menstrual health its own. That is what we are really asking people to fund.
Q. Pinkishe has reported significant institutional growth, from receiving ₹1.04 crore in grants and donations in FY 2022–23 to a projected ₹5 crore in FY 2025–26, alongside partnerships with over 50 CSR organisations. What do these numbers reveal about the evolving confidence of corporate India in specialised, impact-driven non-profits, and what factors have contributed most to this trajectory?
A. Let me give the real context behind the figures, because the path matters more than any single number. For our first years, Pinkishe ran on very little, often under 25 lakh a year. Then, over the last few years, once we opened ourselves to corporate partnerships, the scale began to change. We moved from about 1.01 crore, to 1.38 crore, to 3.2 crore, and then to around 4.5 crore. And our ambition this year is to grow further still, towards 7.5 crore. These are not huge numbers when set beside the largest organisations in the sector, and I would not pretend otherwise. But it is a steady, deliberate climb, and the shape of it tells the real story of how this growth happened. I also want to answer an honest question that some people may quietly ask, which is, if Pinkishe is so well known, why has it reached this size only now? The answer matters to me. For years, including right through the COVID period, we worked largely through volunteers, running awareness camps, distributions and community sessions, and we deliberately did not build ourselves around corporate funding. It was only about five years ago, when we made a conscious decision to move from scattered camps to systematic, transformational programmes, that we truly opened ourselves to CSR. So our growth is not slow. It is the result of a late and deliberate start. We earned the right to corporate funding by first building a model worth funding, and once we did, the trust began to grow quickly. That is what those early years and that steady climb actually represent. What has driven that trust, I think, is a handful of habits, and I will be honest that none of them are glamorous. The first is focus. We have stayed with one problem, menstrual health, and resisted the temptation to become an organisation that does a little of everything. And we have grown it programme by programme, making sure we can do real justice to each one, rather than taking on too much at once and doing none of it properly. Depth earns more trust than breadth.
The second is discipline, and I will admit my own background shapes this. I spent twenty years in the technology industry before this, and we have run Pinkishe like a serious, systems-driven institution from the start, on data, on process, on accountability. That is not how every non-profit is built, and funders can feel the difference.
The third is how carefully we use money, because in the end it is the funder's money. We run a virtual organisation, with no office that everyone travels to, which keeps our costs genuinely lean. In our budgets, our organisational overhead, the true administrative cost of running the institution, is held to about five percent, and everything else goes into delivery on the ground. A funder can see that more of their rupee reaches the girl, and that builds a particular kind of confidence.
And the fourth is simply not overpromising. We have tried hard to say only what we can stand behind, and to be honest when something is still early. I believe that honesty is a large part of why partners come back, and why they bring others with them.
There is one more thing, and it surprises people. We have grown almost entirely through partners choosing to come to us, rather than through any large fundraising machinery. We have never had a big corpus or a dedicated fundraising arm. We simply built the work, and the work brought the partners. That is a humbling way to grow, and it is also why a route like the Social Stock Exchange matters so much to organisations like ours, because it offers a more structured and stable way to fund the long, multi-year programmes that real change requires.
I do not see this growth as my achievement. It belongs to a team that does the hard work every day, and to my daughter Khyati, who began this whole journey at the age of sixteen with a stubbornness I still admire. And it belongs to partners who were willing to back a specialised organisation and grow with us. Our largest, Amazon, is now in a three-year, multi-faceted programme with us across ten districts of Delhi, through which we are working to reach around 4.5 lakh girls and women, with another fifty thousand and more reached through our outreach van. So what does this trajectory tell me about corporate India? That it is increasingly willing to choose depth over breadth, to back organisations that are focused, transparent, disciplined and accountable. When a non-profit behaves like a serious institution while staying rooted in the community, corporate India is ready to walk a long road with it, and often to bring others along.
Q. Behavioural change around menstruation requires the participation of girls, boys, teachers, families, frontline workers, and government systems alike. What have been some of the most significant social or cultural barriers you’ve encountered, and how does Pinkishe work to transform these mindsets into lasting community ownership?
A. This is the part of the work that no dashboard can fully capture. The barriers are real, and some of them are very deep. Let me start honestly, with myself. When we began, in 2017, there was very little open conversation about menstruation, and for a man to step into this space was genuinely difficult. People did not quite know what to make of it. I had to turn to a few women I trusted, friends, and ask them to begin the work with me, because at first not everyone would. That itself told me how heavy the silence was. Even starting required someone willing to vouch for the cause. On the ground, the discomfort runs through everyone, and not only where one might expect it. I remember a government school in Varanasi. We had planned the session carefully with the lady principal, who knew exactly what we were there to do. But when she announced to the class that we had come to talk about menstruation, one of the teachers, a young woman, became so embarrassed and agitated that she could not accept a man being present for it at all. In a very stern voice, she asked me, the visitor sitting quietly at the back, to leave the class.
That moment stayed with me because it showed how deep the unease goes. It is not only in villages or among older generations. It is also among educated people who have grown up in a culture where menstruation was simply never spoken of openly. And then there are places where the barriers are far harder. We work in some very remote, tribal areas. In one village, a woman on her period is still expected to stay outside the boundary of the village itself. The taboo is that complete. It was so much a part of life there that we were told even our own female team members should not come if they were menstruating. I share this not to judge that village, but to be honest about what we are really up against. These are not attitudes that shift with one visit or one poster. So how do you change something this old? Slowly, and never from outside. We have learned that we cannot walk in as strangers and lecture a community into changing. We build the relationship first, and we let the change come through the faces a village already trusts, the teacher, the ASHA worker, the local educator, and eventually the girls themselves. We also bring in boys and fathers, because a silence this complete cannot be broken by speaking only to girls. And I can tell you the change is real, because I can see it in what has become possible. In our early years, we could only work privately. We created small, safe, closed spaces for girls, because that was the only way the subject could even be approached. Those private sessions still continue, and they always will, because girls need safe spaces. But in the last couple of years, we have also been able to do something we could never have done at the start.
We have painted large menstrual health murals on public walls, open for the whole community to see. We run a visible menstrual hygiene education van that moves through neighbourhoods carrying menstrual health messages out in the open. And last year we held a hundred street plays in public spaces, performed in front of men and women together, without separation. Think about what that means. The same subject that, a few years ago, made an educated schoolteacher uncomfortable with a man simply sitting in the room, we are now able to take onto a public wall, into the open street, in front of men and women together. That shift, from something whispered behind closed doors to something painted in the open, is one of the truest measures I can give you that mindsets are changing. And when a community begins to own the conversation in the open, it becomes much harder to push it back into silence.
Q. Looking ahead, what is your long-term vision for Pinkishe Foundation’s contribution to menstrual dignity in India, and what policy, philanthropic, or cross-sector collaborations do you believe will be most critical in ensuring that no girl misses education or opportunities because of her periods?
A. If I allow myself to dream a little, my vision is actually very simple. I want to reach a day when a girl in India never has to think twice about her period. When it is not a reason to miss school, not a reason to feel shame, not a barrier to anything she wants to become. A day when menstruation is treated as the most ordinary, natural thing in the world, because that is exactly what it is.
For Pinkishe, the dream is not to be everywhere ourselves. It is to help build a country where this issue is so well handled by schools, families, communities and the system that an organisation like ours is no longer needed.
But I want to be honest about something important. No single organisation can do this. Not Pinkishe, not any one NGO, not any one company, not even the government alone. The problem is too large and too deep for that. I have come to believe the answer lies in collaboration, and in one idea in particular.
For too long, philanthropy in this country has worked in scattered pieces. One company funds a few schools here, another runs a campaign there, and the efforts do good work, but they do not always add up to transformation. What I would love to see is a more pooled way of giving, where several funders come together behind one shared, measurable goal in one region, and stay with it long enough to change that place completely, rather than each doing a little in isolation. The whole is so much greater than the parts. And newer routes like the Social Stock Exchange can become one of the bridges that makes this kind of collective, accountable giving possible. Alongside that, the most important partner of all is the government. Schools, health systems and district administrations have a reach that no NGO will ever have. Menstrual health needs to be built more deeply into school systems, into WASH planning, adolescent health programmes, teacher training and district-level reviews. Our role, as I see it, is not to replace the system but to show what works, prove the model, and then help the system carry it forward. When civil society, corporates and the government each play to their strength and pull in the same direction, that is when something truly lasting can happen. I should also be honest about who I am in all of this. I am not an expert who arrived with grand theories. I came to this work as a practitioner, learning on the ground, often from my own mistakes, drawn in by a simple conviction that no girl should lose her future to something so natural. That is still what gets me up in the morning. So if I am asked what I hope for, it is this. That one day, a girl in a small village somewhere, on a day she would once have stayed home ashamed, simply goes to school instead, without a second thought, and grows up to become whatever she chooses to be. If we can help make that ordinary across India, then all of this will have been worth it.
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