The Supreme Court judgment on the writ petition on menstrual leave policy leaves no doubt that India’s top court is myopic and reductive on the issue of menstrual justice.
Menstrual Justice is an intersection of infrastructural, intersectional and operational justice, and any policy against gender discrimination in the workplace cannot turn a blind eye towards working during menstruation. The judgment should open up the debate on women's empowerment at the workplace and of menstrual justice in three ways. These observations are drawn from fieldwork conducted towards developing a menstrual leave policy in the police district of Krishnanagar in West Bengal.
The WASH gap
Firstly, most public and private work cultures are dominantly male, and females are a stereotyped presence. A recent McKinsey study reveals that in India, obstacles to women’s workforce participation emerge early at the entry level and decrease by an average of two percentage points per level.
More than half of the 324 organisations surveyed -in India, Kenya and Nigeria- prioritised a baseline policy or a differentiator policy for ensuring gender equity at the workplace. Yet the 'broken rung' remained in a state of unrepair.
For it is not just in numbers that men supersede women at the workplace. My work with the police department helped me comprehend that gender discrimination is present in social interactions, workplace practices, attitudes of male co-workers, ideologically tinged rhetoric and the material designs of the police workplace through which systemic biases operate against women despite legal safeguards.
Specifically, when it comes to menstrual justice at the workplace, people who menstruate do not have access to WASH enabling architecture at the Police Station, medical aid and sanitary napkins. For women police personnel who were undergoing their menstrual cycle and had to work outside the police station/office environment, a system to ensure productive field work through welfare, logistical and medical support was nil.
Conversations with women constables revealed not just faulty organisational designs that work against them but also stray incidents where menstruating women on field duty were threatened with institutional consequences for seeking permission to use the toilet one too many times.
The first step in the direction of creating infrastructural justice, then, is to build adequate women’s toilets with waste baskets and disposal bags where there are none and refurbish those that already exist. Separate and functional toilets close to workstations must be considered non-negotiable minimum requirements.
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Moreover, bringing about a change in attitude amongst women personnel, that the infrastructure is not just another public building but a common resource used to meet a collective WASH goal, sets in a sense of ownership. It was found, all over the district, that this sense of ownership moved them to maintain with care their common WASH resources.
Differences and support
Secondly, policies for safe, equitable and diverse workplaces should not be uniform for all women and gender minorities. Rather, it should be evolutionary and distributive. The ability to manage menstruation with dignity should be a fundamental right. However, the capacity to access menstrual justice varies according to categories of class, caste, ethnicity, age and ability of the person concerned. Most menstrual leave policies determine fair procedures for menstrual justice, neglecting the differentiated capacities of people to access their rights.
According to the India Justice Report 2025 published by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, the representation of women in the Indian Police is 11.7 per cent, of which 90 per cent are in the constabulary and the rest are in the Indian Police Service.
Physical injury, moral injury, pathways to psychological injury and post-traumatic stress levels vary drastically across different levels of the hierarchy, as shown in research, where personnel at the bottom of the pyramid bear with greater proximity to all of the above.
It is the personnel at the bottom of the pyramid who deliver most of the care responsibilities: assisting victims, assisting senior citizens, helping those in distress on the streets, providing prompt medical care regardless of legalities, child protection, all kinds of emergency assistance and community engagement.
Responsibilities that fall into the low prestige category when compared to law and order enforcement, yet are the most common services offered countless times every single day, which are borne by women police constables frequently.
Quite logically, then, no two women working in the same department will have the same welfare needs nor the same agency to advocate for gender justice. For women in the police, the difference in access derives from all of the above categories, plus the disadvantage that comes from framing the employee in the police department as a degendered yet hypermasculine, docile yet aggressive, stoic and uncomplaining.
Even when support came in the form of free sanitary napkins, the gesture was tedious and technocratic, for the welfare was designed from up the hierarchy by male superiors who deemed that installing sanitary napkin dispensers that dispensed substandard napkins at centralised locations is sufficient.
Personnel at the Krishnanagar Police District suggested that sanitary napkins be included in every police station's standard first aid kit for better accessibility. Police stations received monthly allocations of sanitary napkins based on their specific requirements. Regular feedback was sought by a DSP-level officer, and the feedback forum at every police station was gathered under the guidance of the internal committee.
As a practice, the Internal Committee formed under the POSH Act conducted quarterly gender justice workplace audits, where they discussed the benefits and issues of current support measures and offered timely recommendations. This practice sealed the intention-implementation gap.
The Krishnanagar Model
Thirdly, policy reforms and institutional redesign can work if issues of gender justice at the workplace are addressed from the operational level and below.
Real issues of gender discrimination that impact daily, short-term, repetitive tasks and bring down the operational efficiency of the organisation must be addressed first before creating frameworks at the strategic level or at large scale. Menstrual justice seeks to identify and rectify pain, both biological and social: physical pain that comes from menstruation as well as the socio-psychological pain that comes from withstanding the ‘stigma’ of menstruating.
To be forced to work in pain is harassment. No Indian labour law defines pain legally, although it is considered a trigger for leaves, benefits and compensation. If a back injury at work triggers compensation or leave, why does the chronic, monthly pain of dysmenorrhea, compounded by heavy riot gear and lack of toilets, not trigger the same institutional empathy?
Menstrual justice at operational levels can ensure that tasks and jobs are organised to be meaningful to the women and reduce painful experiences at work.
At the Krishnanagar Police District, a discretionary 2-day menstrual leave policy, subject to guidelines, was instituted. Women police personnel availed the leave in three ways:
1) through scheduling for lighter duty that does not involve any field duty or law and order duty while menstruating
2) rotating work schedules through a rolling calendar and loose PS level coordination
3)opting for remote work.
A hallmark of this policy was that it empowered women personnel to independently manage their leave and menstrual leave registers to ensure fairness while preventing misuse. This is a significant step, for even the draft Menstrual Leave Law 2024 tabled in the Lok Sabha called for a cumbersome leave application process.
Expectedly, there were outliers in this scheme; two women constables at a police station reported that they refused to avail the leave and mark it up in the register for fear of being mocked at, nevertheless stayed at home for a day or two with permission from the officer-in-charge. Ultimately, the policy’s most humane achievement was providing physical relief. For personnel accustomed to long shifts, the simple luxury of not standing, to stay off their feet, felt revolutionary.
Thinking about menstrual justice
What we need are intentional, operational-level changes that position menstrual justice as a capacity enhancer for the people who wish to access and use it.
Menstrual justice for police personnel at the workplace should come with other development measures that address interactional injustice, scheduled flexibility for nursing mothers, flexibility for women with care responsibilities, and customised riot gear and uniforms for women instead of the ‘unisex male’. For any organisation, a good place to start is with a gender audit to bring to light barriers in configuring an equitable workplace.
Having said all that, how to think of the issue of menstrual justice? Supportive rhetoric for the Supreme Court judgment hinged on dataism, biologism, corporatism and a kind of equalism that considers inclusion as charity.
One cannot understand menstrual justice with data points alone, which point to the percentage of women who suffer from painful periods. When legal discourse is buttressed with statements like ‘studies show that only five per cent of women suffer from endometriosis’, the court and the proponents of the verdict commit the exact pathologisation and biologism with data that it proposed would be the effect of a menstrual leave policy.
Health-related data mining in India has still not attained sufficient granularity, even to drive existing digital healthcare initiatives. Besides dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, amenorrhea, oligomenorrhea, polymenorrhea, Premenstrual Syndrome, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, Intermenstrual Bleeding, PCOD, Endometriosis, etc., are conditions that cannot be easily dataified, for the experience of each suffering woman is fundamentally different and cannot be easily captured. To refer to biological sameness as a tactic to wash over the inherent differences and then to use it as a tactic to block off creating a legally enforceable right is manipulative.
It is easy to infer that the antagonists of menstrual justice, who mention the ‘practical reality of the job market’, speak in the tone of a purple feminist who believes that issues around menstruation are personal.
When in reality matters around menstruation are a collective, systemic issue compounded by physical, cognitive, legal and medical social structures. In claiming that a right is not appropriate to the logic of the market, the verdict and its proponents commit a series of presumtions of the ambit of law and rights: one in which it is presumed that only elite woman working in elite sectors of the ecomony need to be under judicial protection of any kinds of right if it all and secondly, that systemtic issues that require legal solutions can be solved voluntarily. The kind of feminist thinking that will be happily appreciated by the market.
When 90 to 95 per cent of women in India are working in the informal economy, and likely have issues related to menstruation, the judgment was definitely played according to laissez-faire. The blanket proposition, which the antagonist tried to stave off in the name of equality, is already working, quite ironically. Simply put, when it comes to menstruation, people who menstruate are already different from people who do not, and that requires support if it hampers their quality of life and their ability to work. The recent verdict is for those who still think of menstruation as a shame and would rather invest their energies in taboo mongering. Hypercapitalist, masculine standards should not be the lid on the issue of menstruation. PERIOD.
(Lakshmi Prabha P. is a researcher at Jadavpur University. She worked on developing a Framework for Gender Justice and Safety for Women Police Personnel at Work under the Krishnanagar District Police in West Bengal)
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
