Why girls drop out after their first period, and what the Supreme Court’s new ruling requires of Indian schools

Every year, thousands of Indian girls quietly leave school once they start menstruating. On 30 January 2026, the Supreme Court declared menstrual health a fundamental right and ordered every school in the country, government and private, to fix the reasons why.

Dr Sunita Arora | Adolescent health physician and public health researcher

Use of hygienic menstrual methods among Indian women aged 15 to 24 rose from 57.6 percent in NFHS-4 (2015-16) to 77.3 percent in NFHS-5 (2019-21), according to the National Family Health Survey. That is real progress. It also means roughly one young woman in five still doesn’t have it, with the state-level range running from 98.3 percent in Tamil Nadu down to 58.9 percent in Bihar. Dasra’s 2014 report “Spot On!” put a number on what that gap costs in classrooms: an estimated 23 million girls dropping out of school in India every year after reaching puberty, largely for want of facilities, products or basic information. That figure comes from a single widely cited source rather than government data, and deserves to be read as an estimate rather than a census. What isn’t in dispute is that the country’s highest court has now weighed in directly.

What did the Supreme Court just rule, and why does it matter for schools?

On 30 January 2026, a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan ruled in Dr. Jaya Thakur vs Government of India & Ors, W.P.(C) No. 1000/2022, that the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution includes the right to menstrual health, and connected it to the right to education under Article 21A and the equality guarantee under Article 14. The judgment, authored by Justice Pardiwala, ordered pan-India implementation of the Centre’s Menstrual Hygiene Policy for School-going Girls in every school, government, government-aided and private, for girls in Classes 6 to 12. The directions are specific: free biodegradable sanitary napkins at no cost, functional gender-segregated toilets with working water connections, a dedicated menstrual hygiene management corner in every school, mandatory teacher sensitisation, and awareness programmes for students, teachers and parents. District Education Officers must now conduct annual inspections that include anonymous student surveys, and the Court warned that private schools face de-recognition for non-compliance while state governments are directly accountable for failures in public schools. It kept the case open for continued monitoring rather than closing it after delivery, which is precisely why the ruling now carries teeth.

How did menstrual hygiene become a Supreme Court matter in the first place?

A government report placed before the Court in 2026 found that 98,592 government schools nationwide still had no functional toilet for girls, and 61,540 had no usable toilet of any kind.

The case took years to reach this point. Congress leader and social worker Dr Jaya Thakur filed the petition in 2022, seeking free sanitary pads and separate toilets for girls in Classes 6 to 12. Orders on 10 April 2023 and 6 November 2023 directed the Centre to work out a national model for toilet construction and a policy for distributing menstrual products, since neither existed in any coordinated form at the time. In June 2024, the education ministry issued a narrower but immediate advisory: girls should be allowed necessary restroom breaks during board exams for Classes 10 and 12, and free sanitary napkins should be available at every examination centre. By November 2024, the Centre confirmed to the Court that the national policy had been finalised. The Court reserved its final judgment on 10 December 2025 and delivered it seven weeks later. In hearings since, the petitioner’s counsel has argued that compliance reports from states read more like policy proposals than proof of anything built or functioning, and the bench has warned it will treat further laxity strictly, with the next status hearing set for 1 September 2026.

What does the ground reality actually look like right now?

UDISE+ 2023-24 data records separate toilets for girls in 97 percent of India’s 1.47 million schools, a number usually read as good news. The NITI Aayog report placed before the Supreme Court during 2026 compliance hearings tells a more specific story: 98,592 government schools with no functional girls’ toilet, and 61,540 with no usable toilet of any description. The gap between the two figures is the gap between what gets reported and what a girl actually finds when she needs it, which is the entire reason the case has stayed open for continued monitoring rather than being treated as settled by the January judgment alone. Earlier Supreme Court rulings the Jaya Thakur bench drew on, including Deepak Rana vs State of Uttarakhand (2016) and Radha Shekhawat vs State of Rajasthan (2015), had already held that basic toilet access is part of the constitutional right to education; a 2025 ruling, State of West Bengal vs Krishnendu Biswas, specifically linked poor sanitation to school dropout among girls.

What already exists that most schools aren’t using?

Some of the infrastructure the January 2026 ruling demands has existed on paper for years. The Menstrual Hygiene Scheme, run since 2011 under the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram, was designed to get subsidised sanitary napkins to adolescent girls in rural areas. Since 2018, the government’s Jan Aushadhi Kendras have sold Suvidha oxo-biodegradable sanitary napkins at ₹1 a pad, a packet of four for ₹4, against a market price of ₹3 to ₹8 a pad; more than 72 crore pads had been sold through this route by January 2025. NCERT’s Adolescence Education Programme already carries menstrual health content as part of its broader curriculum, coordinated with the education ministry and UNFPA, though a 2018 survey published in the Journal of Global Health by Sivakami and colleagues, covering government schools across three Indian states, found that awareness programmes on paper and functioning support in practice were often two different things. None of this required the Supreme Court’s involvement to exist. It required the Court’s involvement to actually reach the girls it was meant for.

What to do

Audit your school against the January 2026 ruling’s specific requirements now, not against general good intentions: free biodegradable sanitary napkins on site, a functional gender-segregated toilet with running water, a dedicated menstrual hygiene management corner, and documented teacher sensitisation. Private schools face de-recognition risk for gaps here, which makes this an urgent compliance question, not an optional one.

Check the actual cost of stocking pads against the Suvidha scheme’s ₹1-a-pad rate through your nearest Jan Aushadhi Kendra before assuming a supply programme is unaffordable.

Request or organise the teacher sensitisation training the ruling now makes mandatory, and treat it as a working session rather than a formality; a teacher who is visibly uncomfortable with the topic undoes an otherwise well-stocked MHM corner.

Use NCERT’s Adolescence Education Programme materials for the menstrual health module specifically, rather than letting it get quietly skipped in a crowded syllabus, since the programme already exists and does not need to be built from scratch.

Keep a simple monthly log of girls’ attendance patterns at your own school, the same way you’d track any other absenteeism trend, so you know whether the national numbers are showing up locally instead of assuming they aren’t.

Sources: Dr. Jaya Thakur vs Government of India & Ors, W.P.(C) No. 1000/2022, Supreme Court of India (judgment dated 30 January 2026) · National Family Health Survey-4 and NFHS-5, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare · Dasra, “Spot On! Improving Menstrual Health and Hygiene in India” (2014) · NITI Aayog report on school sanitation, cited in Supreme Court compliance hearings (2026) · UDISE+ 2023-24 Report, Ministry of Education, Government of India · Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana, Department of Pharmaceuticals · Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare · Sivakami, Van Eijk, Thakur et al., “Effect of menstruation on girls and their schooling, and facilitators of menstrual hygiene management in schools,” Journal of Global Health (2018) · NCERT Adolescence Education Programme