Guest Lecture on Women and Health Organised by Center for Gender Justice and Law

About the Speakers

Maya Vishwakarma, also known as “The Padwoman of India,” is the founder and chairperson of the Sukarma Foundation. A native of Mehragaon village in the Narsinghpur district of Madhya Pradesh in central India, Maya has been living in San Francisco, California, USA, for nearly a decade.
After completing high school in her village, Maya went to Jabalpur RDVV University for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biochemistry. Her master’s thesis/dissertation work at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, focused on Nuclear Medicine. Later, she finished her Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in similar areas. She moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT) but decided to leave the program and move to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue her career in Cancer Biology Research, and serve people, at the UCSF Medical Center. Maya, who has a strong connection to her native land and its people, has been deeply inspired by Padman Arunachalam Murganatham and his remarkable achievements promoting hygienic practices in his home state of Tamil Nadu in India. She researched a few more Indian startups that produce affordable sanitary napkins using semi-automatic pad-making machines. Working on the initiative, the Sukarma Foundation established a mini-factory in the Narsinghpur district of Madhya Pradesh in 2017 to make sanitary napkins, under the brand name No Tension, which provides employment to local women and raises awareness of the taboo subjects of pads and periods in Madhya Pradesh’s tribal areas. The project’s objective is to protect tribal and rural girls and women from infections such as RTIs (Reproductive Tract Infections), UTIs (Urinary Tract Infections) and Cervical Cancer by educating them about menstrual hygiene and providing hygienic and low-cost sanitary pads. The San Francisco Bay Area-based Sukarma Foundation that Maya founded also started a medical health camp in Narsinghpur that is attended by the largest number of patients in these years. They also performed mammography tests, or mammograms, using the iBreastExam machine for 300 women in remote tribal villages and started the first Sukarma Telemedicine Health Center Mehragaon, run by two young bright village girls who attend to 20-plus patients every day. While working in her home district for the past 5-6 years, Maya made a documentary on the model village, Baghuvar in Madhya Pradesh, titled “Swaraj Mumkin Hai” (“Independence is Possible”) and wrote a book by the same name. These projects were aimed at spreading awareness of rural education and sustainable villages and have been awarded and appreciated at the national and international levels. Maya has worked on developing leukemia vaccines and on bone-marrow gene therapy, and her various works and expertise have been featured in Time Magazine, The Economic Times, and Al Jazeera America, among other news media outlets.