Society has an impressive talent for improving the vocabulary of cruelty. Exile becomes custom. A collapsing hut becomes a women’s space. Exposure to snakes, storms and medical danger becomes respect for tradition. In Sitatola, a village in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district, Madia women challenged the practice of sending menstruating women to isolated kurma ghars by helping create a safer building called Mawa Askan Lon—their rightful home as women. The phrase matters. It shifts the subject from reluctant accommodation to dignity.
The practice had drawn concern for years. A National Human Rights Commission compilation describes how women in the region came together against unsafe menstrual huts and references the development of the Mawa Askan Lon initiative. Reporting from the region has documented huts with inadequate protection and the slow work of persuading communities to change. My reaction is not to marvel that rural women have discovered modernity. It is to notice how often institutions required the women to carry both the danger and the burden of reform.
Tradition is not a self-executing defence
The word “tradition” tells us that a practice has history. It does not tell us that the practice is just, safe or even unchanged over time. Communities alter clothing, transport, crops, phones, schooling and political alliances without requiring a philosophical emergency. Restrictions affecting women’s bodies somehow receive a heritage shield. Questioning them is described as an attack from outsiders, even when women inside the community have been objecting for years.
Outsiders must still approach carefully. A reporter, official or activist can misunderstand local language and flatten a community into a single embarrassing custom. Tribal populations have endured displacement, administrative neglect and patronising interventions. Reform imposed through humiliation may produce resistance or drive the practice out of sight. The answer is not silence. It is to centre the testimony, leadership and choices of affected women while ensuring that basic safety and rights are not negotiated away.
Mawa Askan Lon is compelling because its name and design emerged as an answer articulated by women. A safer collective space can be a transitional step where immediate abolition of seclusion faces resistance. Purists may object that building a better facility preserves the discriminatory premise. They have a point: menstruation should not require banishment in any building. But reform is not weakened by recognising stages. A secure room with water, sanitation and access to care can prevent harm now while conversation continues about ending compulsory separation.
Infrastructure reveals whose discomfort counts
Sanitation discussions often become exercises in counting toilets. A usable facility also requires water, privacy, disposal, lighting, maintenance and social permission. Menstrual dignity depends on access to products, health information and freedom from stigma. A structure without those systems becomes another photograph taken at inauguration. The unglamorous maintenance committee is more important than the plaque.
Women in remote villages may face long journeys to clinics, shortages of health workers and limited transport during emergencies. Isolation during menstruation magnifies those risks. A fever, heavy bleeding, pregnancy complication, snakebite or storm does not respect ritual timing. Any seclusion arrangement must be evaluated against the simple question: can this woman reach help immediately? If the answer is no, culture has been made to outrank life.
Government departments frequently work in silos. Tribal welfare, rural development, health, women and child development, sanitation and district administration may each possess part of the responsibility. The woman in the hut experiences all their gaps at once. A credible programme needs one accountable local mechanism, public tracking and flexible funds for repairs, transport and supplies. Another awareness poster will not hold down a roof in a monsoon.
Men must lose the luxury of spectatorship
Menstrual exclusion is often described as a women’s issue, which conveniently excuses men from knowing anything about it. Male relatives, elders, elected representatives and officials influence the rules, budgets and household decisions. They should participate in education and reform. The goal is not to invite men to supervise women’s bodies more efficiently. It is to make them responsible for dismantling danger and stigma they have been permitted to ignore.
Boys need accurate health education before prejudice hardens into humour and prohibition. Schools can normalise menstruation as biology without treating girls as demonstration material. Health workers require supplies and privacy for conversations. Local leaders can state publicly that a woman will not be punished for declining unsafe seclusion. Social change accelerates when authority stops whispering support and begins making protection visible.
The initiative also challenges urban self-congratulation. City residents may not send women to forest huts, but menstrual stigma survives through workplace silence, school absence, housing restrictions, religious prohibitions and jokes. Disposable products are available, yet toilets can be unusable and pain dismissed. It is easy to pity a distant practice because distance prevents self-examination.
Do not turn the women into inspirational wallpaper
Human-interest journalism loves courage because courage produces an uplifting ending. The danger is that individual bravery becomes an excuse for institutional failure. Women should not need extraordinary persistence to obtain a safe place. When a story ends with their resilience, I want to ask who failed before they had to become resilient and who is now responsible for maintaining the change.
A separate report about grassroots work in the same district described former panchayat leader Bhagyasri Lekhami’s efforts to support education in remote communities; the account of her work in Gadchiroli illustrates how local leadership persists amid power shortages, difficult travel and thin resources. These initiatives should not be romanticised as proof that government can withdraw. They show why public institutions must recognise, fund and learn from people who understand local constraints.
Success in Sitatola should be measured over years. Are women still compelled to leave their homes? Is the building maintained? Are deaths and health emergencies prevented? Do younger women have greater choice? Are nearby villages adopting safer arrangements or ending seclusion? Are women involved in budgets and monitoring? A ribbon-cutting cannot answer these questions.
I admire Mawa Askan Lon because it names dignity as a right rather than a charitable upgrade. I also hope it becomes unnecessary. The safest menstrual hut is ultimately no compulsory hut at all. Until communities reach that point, practical improvements should be supported without pretending the underlying exclusion has disappeared.
The story matters because reform arrived neither as a heroic order from above nor as a magical abandonment of culture. Women argued, organised and built a safer alternative within a difficult social landscape. They made hypocrisy visible: a custom defended as protection was failing to protect. Timber and a roof cannot complete the argument, but they can give women somewhere safer to stand while they continue it.
