Aditi Gupta talks to Spectralhues

Aditi Gupta, founder of Menstrupedia.com, India’s first website talks openly about women’s monthly cycles and tried to erase the fuss regarding periods, menarche and women issues. Menstrupedia addresses the hygiene factor related to the monthly periods and it is considered to be a popular guide to menstruations. Aditi’s husband Tuhin has been an active supporter of this project from the beginning and the duos pioneer work bring them not only popularity but lots of young girls have been found it extremely helpful.

Spectralhues got in touch with Aditi recently. Let’s hear what’s she has said to Susmita Bose in one-on-one chat.

Congratulations Aditi for another milestone! Forbes India has just listed you in ‘30 Under 30’. How are you feeling?

Thank you. It’s an honor and I feel humbled.

How did the idea of creating a website on menstruation arise in your mind?

At NID, when I and Tuhin got into a relationship, Tuhin came to know more about the pain and inconvenience that girls and women go through every month during their periods and how they are often treated impure because of it. It wouldn’t be very hard to imagine what a young girl goes through in the absence of a proper source of information on the subject and on top of that being branded impure by her own family. I had myself experienced and dealt with menstruation related problems in my life and had always felt a need for trustworthy and easily accessible information on this subject. This might be a situation not just in India but in many other countries as well. And we saw a lot of design scope to take up this gap of information as communication designers.

What started out as a thesis project at NID has now become Menstrupedia. I had taken up a yearlong project to study the level of awareness about menstruation in young girls. Though it was my project, Tuhin was closely involved in it from the beginning as it is not just a problem of women health and hygiene but also a communication design problem. At the end of the project we found a need for an appropriate guide about menstruation for young girls. So we created a prototype where we explained menstruation through comic medium using characters and stories and tested it with young girls. We received a very positive response. So, one inspiration was this that what we are doing at Menstrupedia has a thorough yearlong research to back it.

After working 3 years in e-learning industry and having  saved some money as an initial investment, we quite our jobs and started working full time on Menstupedia from August 2013.

Rajat Mittal (3^rd founding member) who is a graduate from DAIICT and a post Graduate in Computers from Arizona State University, Joined us in 2013.With his technical skills our team was pretty much complete.

Menstrupedia website was launched in November, 2012

Did you feel there any kind of inhibitions, social taboo or resistance in the beginning?

I did at the beginning of the project and it’s quite natural as my work deals with a taboo subject.

Do you plan to address the issue of problems related to Menopause too?

Yes addressing Menopause and pregnancy is in our future plans once we expand our team and have more resources but not at the moment. Menstruation related issues are our immediate concern and there is a huge scope of work that needs to be done.

You have been speaking on the social platforms about this issue. What kind of responses have you been receiving from the target audience?

The response has been overwhelming. People are taking about menstruation more openly, men and women alike.

We received 70 thousand visitors on Menstruedia’s website. We receive visitors from 195 countries which mean we get visitors from every country of the world. On an average a user spend 3 mins on our website.

 Indian society is very conservative when it comes to issues of as rather private sort. Do you think it is high time for the society to be more open?

The problem with being conservative about menstruation and sex education is that, it fires back at our girls and children. The ignorance and misinformation passes from one generation to the other resulting is low self esteem, girls and women following various menstrual myths and restricting customs which happens their personal growth in life. But the society is slowly changing and that’s a very good sign.

Do you have any plan to write a book in future about the experiences relating to menstrupedia.com

Tuhin and I have been planning to make a graphic novel about our experience but right now it’s just a thought.

I heard that a comic book is in the writing. When can we expect it to be released?

The comic book is in its final stage of development and would take another 3 months time to be print ready. It was developed to test the medium. We took this comic in to schools in Mehsana, Gandhinagr, Ahmedabad and Ranchi. We received a very positive response from girls, parents as well as teachers.The prototype of which is already being used by NGOs in U.P., M.P, Patna, Ladakh and Delhi and have reached 400 girls in various parts of India

Any message to the readers…

a. Plan well in advance for raising funds to support the venture and have backup plans as well.

b. Conduct extensive research to understand the user needs properly as this will form a strong foundation to the concept. Keep the focus on the user need rather than the product. Product is supposed to change and adapt to the user needs.

c. Use social media to aggressively market the concept and connect with your supporters.

Thanks for your time Aditi, will meet again. Wish you good luck for your future.

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