Hyderabad: Meet the padman from city

The saying, 'No one would even understand a situation, until and unless they have been through it' goes pretty well with the journey of this young social worker. Meet, Kamal Nayak, a city-based social worker whose NGO, Good Universe, is striving to help people understand the importance of menstrual health.

Kamal is basically from Orissa and completed his degree in digital filmmaking and came to the city. He worked in a few Telugu production houses as a 3D artist. However, while working in the production house for around 6 months, he realised that this was not something he was passionate about. Hailing from a rural and an orthodox family in Odisha, he grew up seeing the difficulties that the women in his family were facing.

After quitting his job, he joined an NGO and started working with them for quite a long time and was placed in Patancheru to work with those addicted to alcohol and and tobaccos.

Sharing his details The Hans India, Kamal said, "From the very beginning in the childhood, I saw poverty very closely as I belonged to a very rural and orthodox family, in a place in Odisha, where you never had proper electricity, drinking water, sanitation and school. I always wanted to do something for others. How may family members faced health issues or domestic abuses, I was a close witness to and was in awe of their toughness and willpower. I felt deeply for them." This drew him towards ameliorating the state of underprivileged women.

"We work on building menstrual health, mental health, and attend to pregnancy and other health aspects. We also address gender-based violence. We provide support to domestic violence victims. Since 2015, we have helped more than 40,000 women and adolescent girls in Telangana and AP," adds Kamal.

In their work, they take the help of researchers, scientists, psychologists and doctors. They prepare a program and deliver services in different slums and intervene at least for 3 months in the slum areas. 'Menstrual festival,' is the first initiative where we spoke about menstrual health in public places such as shopping malls amid thousand of people, he says.

Nayak shares, "Whenever we talk about menstrual health it is always within the four walls, but we want to reach out to people right from a rickshaw wala to the top-notch people. We were the first organisation in South India to talk about the PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome) in 2015. We create dialogues around PCOS and how a person with PCOS can deal with it mentally and physically. We worked with more than 3000 people in more than 17 cities and we helped them with different programs."

Sharing about the challenges they faced, Kamal shares, "Talking about menstrual or women health was a challenge. My friends also told that I have gone crazy and they this was something that guys should not talk about. People always told me that there is no money in this field but for me it is not money but the safety.

Males from the slums used to scold us when we would talk about it, but slowly things changed and we see a good change in their perception and acceptance," Kamal signs off.