Authors:
Oshini Kularathne and Harini Fernando
She does it without a word. In a low-income household in Colombo, a mother reaches past the sanitary napkins she has set aside for her daughters and folds an old cloth for herself instead.
It is a small, private act, repeated every month. Her daughters will never know. Hundreds of kilometres away, in the mist-wrapped tea estates of Nuwara Eliya, a teenage girl has just experienced her first period.
She will not go to school for the next five weeks. She will not enter the kitchen, approach a place of worship, or look her brothers in the eye. Behind a makeshift curtain of sari fabric, she waits for it to be over, having never been told that what is happening to her body is normal.
These two have never met. One grew up in the shadow of a city that prides itself on progress. The other was born into an estate sector that the rest of the country has long treated as someone else’s problem. Their circumstances are worlds apart. And yet every month, without fail, both pay the same invisible price.
Period poverty goes well beyond the inability to afford a pad. It means having no clean water to wash with, no lockable door to change behind, no safe way to dispose of used products, and critically, no honest information about what menstruation even is.
When any one of these is absent, the effects ripple outward into health, schooling, work, and self-worth in ways that are slow to show and hard to reverse. In Sri Lanka, that absence is the everyday reality for an estimated one in two menstruating households. This is not a problem at the margins of society. It is a structural injustice hiding in plain sight behind a culture that has made silence its default.
Recent research by the Centre for Poverty Analysis across low-income communities in Colombo (602 respondents) and the estate sector of Nuwara Eliya (417 respondents) shows just how sharply where you live determines your experience of your own body. In Colombo, over 90% of respondents in the low-income settlements have pipe-borne water, soap, and a lockable washroom door at home. The minimum conditions for menstrual dignity, however imperfect, exist within reach.
In the hill country estates, they largely do not. Only 36% of estate respondents have running water in their washrooms, and fewer than half have a toilet inside their home. These numbers describe something more than inconvenience.
They describe women who begin work before dawn, spend long hours plucking tea on steep slopes with no washroom access, and return home to no running water. The physical toll is immediate and lasting: chronic genitourinary infections are a direct and under-reported consequence, borne quietly by a workforce the formal economy depends upon but rarely looks after.
That these women continue to show up, day after day, under such conditions is less a testament to resilience than an indictment of the systems that have failed them.
The estate Tamil community carries a disproportionate share of this burden, one forged over generations of colonial labour policy and sustained by persistent institutional neglect.
The financial pressure is stark: 17% of estate women report cutting back on food to afford menstrual products, compared to only 4% in low-income settlements in Colombo. In households where multiple women and girls menstruate, it is almost always the mother who goes without, repurposing old cloth so her daughters do not have to.
A Government tax policy that classifies sanitary products as a luxury ensures that the cost stays stubbornly out of reach for those who can least absorb it. When it comes to disposal, 93% of respondents from Colombo low-income settlements use a rubbish bin.
In the estates, infrequent garbage collection forces 37% to burn their pads, 19% to bury them, and some to throw them into rivers, creating an environmental hazard as invisible as the women behind it.
Yet infrastructure is only half the story. Regardless of postcode, girls and women in both communities face a deeper injustice rooted not in pipes or policies but in what people believe. Over half of all respondents, 53% in the estates in Nuwara Eliya and 44% in low-income settlements in Colombo, believe that menstruating women are impure.
Despite their social and economic contexts, these findings highlight how deeply entrenched menstrual stigma remains in both rural estate and urban low-income settings. That belief does not stay abstract. It becomes rules, restrictions, and rituals that mark a girl’s body as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be supported.
Girls are isolated at menarche, sometimes for weeks. In the estate sector, an average of 34 school days is lost after a girl’s first period due to cultural seclusion alone. In Colombo, the figure sits between 13 and 20 days.
The disruption does not end there: 32% of school-going girls in Colombo still skip school during regular periods, kept away by severe pain, the fear of staining, or washrooms that offer neither privacy nor hygiene.
Places of worship are placed off limits, a restriction accepted by 81% of estate respondents and 75% in Colombo. Nutritious foods including meat, fish, and eggs are avoided on the basis of cultural beliefs with no medical grounding, depriving the body of what it needs. The subject remains firmly closed to men and boys, leaving women to carry the burden entirely alone.
The result is a generational cycle with no end in sight. A staggering 66% of estate respondents and 58% in Colombo had no knowledge of menstruation before their first period. Information passes from mother to daughter with the myths intact, because schools whose teachers are ill-equipped or too embarrassed to teach reproductive health, rarely step in.
Around 33% of women in both sectors extend a single pad well beyond the safe four-to-six hour limit, not by choice, but because they are unable to afford a replacement or nowhere private to change. Severe menstrual pain is so routinely dismissed as normal that most women never seek care, leaving conditions undetected for years.
The mental burden compounds this further: many women report heightened anxiety and mood disruption during their cycles, yet normalised suffering means they rarely receive any support, medical or otherwise.
The solutions are known, yet they are held back by a lack of social and political will to act, a failure reflected across the socio-political structure. As policymakers, the government must remove taxes on menstrual products without delay: treating a biological necessity as a luxury is a political and economic choice, and it must be reversed.
Schools, too, must introduce honest, age-appropriate menstrual education before girls reach menarche, with teachers properly trained to deliver it openly and without shame. At the same time, sustained investment in water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure, particularly in the estate sector, must be recognised as a matter of rights rather than a deferred priority.
But policy alone is not enough. Community campaigns that bring men, boys, and religious leaders into open conversation are not peripheral to this effort. Stigma does not dissolve through policy documents. It dissolves through the steady, deliberate work of making the ordinary visible.
The mother in Colombo will fold that cloth again next month. The girl in Nuwara Eliya will face the same curtain, the same silence, the same five lost weeks. Behind every statistic in this article is a person, not a symbol or case study, but someone living the consequences of sociopolitical apathy.
We cannot call ourselves a just society while half its population silently pays a tax based on a biological phenomenon out of their control, while the other half barely or never notices it, and no one in power considers it urgent enough to stop.
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Authors Bio:
Oshini Kularathne is a Junior Research Professional and Harini Fernando is Team Leader – Gender and Development at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA).