Team:MITADTBIO Pune/Public Engagement
It is not a problem when 121 million(out of the 336 million) menstruating women if India use Sanitary Napkins containing plastic. It is not a problem when each one uses an average of 8 napkins per cycle. It is not even an issue when we sit down, do the math and find out this means 12 billion used Sanitary Napkins are generated each year.It IS a problem when out of the 1.7 billion citizens of India, only a few million are aware of these figures. It IS a problem when only a handful say, "Alright, that's enough. Lets do something about this.” The MITADTBio_Pune team is one of the handful. While working on PEred as a solution, we realized that starting a change in people's mentality as just as important in the long-term. Educating them about the fallout of careless disposal of Plastic used Sanitary Napkins was essential to an all-round solution.
POSTERS
Working on PEred has given us an invaluable opportunity to leave our labs behind and go out into the world and actually interact and engage with the community at large.
Menstruation being a rather delicate subject in a country like India meant we had to come up with creative and restrained means to broach the topic with the general public. We did this via innovative posters in English as well as the vernacular languages such as Hindi and Marathi that we then proceeded to display at certain spots across the city.
Here’s a glimpse of the posters we designed and displayed at various colleges and girls hostels:
SEMINARS
We also held seminars with young students at high schools in our locality where we described the crisis at hand and how PEred is being engineered to confront this head on. Moreover, we were also able to give them a brief glimpse into the world of synthetic biology and its versatile applications.
Imperial College London – Presenting at ICL allowed us to break ground with an international crowd, many of whom were fascinated by the concept of iGEM. Once there, we also got the chance to collaborate with the iGEM team from the University of Indonesia. The faculty at the Summer Program there were also very interested in hearing about our projects.
We also held seminars with young students at high schools in our locality where we described the crisis at hand and how PEred is being engineered to confront this head on. Moreover, we were also able to give them a brief glimpse into the world of synthetic biology and its versatile applications.
Imperial College London – Presenting at ICL allowed us to break ground with an international crowd, many of whom were fascinated by the concept of iGEM. Once there, we also got the chance to collaborate with the iGEM team from the University of Indonesia. The faculty at the Summer Program there were also very interested in hearing about our projects.
PROJECT AMARA
On a couple of weekends, some of our team members attended sessions held by Project Amara, a local NGO that works to dismantle the taboo surrounding menstruation while also spreading awareness about the toxic plastic waste menstrual products generate. During these sessions, we saw that the members educated people about the components of various sanitary products such as tampons, pads, cups, etc and explained the environmental and health ramifications of using each of these products. This corroborated with our own research regarding sanitary pad waste and served to remind us that we were on the right track as we set about our project.
We were also fortunate enough to share the stage with Project Amara as we spoke about PEred and what our project aims to do.
On a parting note, they told us how contrary to popular belief, rural women are easier to talk to about menstruation and taking our project there to spread awareness would be a good idea.
INTERACTION
Although functional, just displaying posters didn’t do justice to our project and the potential social impact it could have. We thus decided to undertake a more hands-on approach to engage with the masses. Our college being located on the outskirts of the city means that a major chunk of the housekeeping staff hail from the semi-urban locality of LoniGaon(Village). This gave us a chance to engage in conversation with certain staff about menstruation as well as menstrual waste and the problems that come with it. We successfully got the point of menstrual waste being a menace across. Additionally, we also spoke to youth in our localities and briefed them about our project and the problem it aims to resolve.
DIGITAL
We’d fail to be valuable members of Gen Z if we didn’t use digital media to further our cause.
To have a wider gambit, we’ve written articles about the Menstrual Waste crisis, synthetic biology and the role we hope PEred will play in mitigating the issues at hand.
Here’s a link to the article that was published on the Youthopia website
We’ve also maintained a strong presence on social media, running an Instagram account through which we provided regular updates on the work we’ve been doing in the lab as well as informing our followers about the problem we’re tackling.
