VIJAYAWADA: A machine got scrapped. A supplier wanted orders by the tonne. A three-layer biodegradable pad, seven months in the making, never made it past a handful of villages. By most measures Project Suraksha failed. Sohan Pappu admits this without flinching, then explains why it remains work he is proudest of.
Sohan has run Our Youth Social Community (OYSC) out of Vijayawada since he was 15. Nine years on it is a nationally registered NGO with hundreds of interns and a TEDx talk on stigma and menstrual health. Asked what shaped the organisation most, he does not point to the stage or the numbers. He points to a sanitary napkin that almost never left the lab.
The idea began with a conversation. A group of MBA interns were talking about menstruation and how rarely anyone around Vijayawada spoke about it. They wondered if they could build something themselves. What followed was seven months of trial and error.
The team developed a pad using banana fibre pulp to replace plastic and chemicals in commercial products with something biodegradable and locally sourced.
Early samples reached villages in Guntur and Krishna districts in 2021. Then reality intervened. The fibre processing machine broke down. The supplier began demanding orders by the tonne. Every cheaper substitute worked on paper and fell apart in practice. The product never survived outside the prototype. That could have been the end of Project Suraksha.
Instead it became something else. “Even though we failed, the awareness that needed to be created was created,” Sohan says. The pad stalled. The conversation did not. Campaigns around Project Suraksha reached hundreds of thousands of students and pushed a subject many families still avoid into classrooms, onto a TEDx stage and in front of television cameras.
Project Suraksha was never the finished product. It was the gateway. This year has proved the point again, if in quieter ways. In June more than 15 OYSC volunteers spent a day at Government General Hospital in Vijayawada as part of Youth Time Bank, a district initiative run with the NTR District Youth Welfare Department.
In 2022 the organisation argued that forced marriage should be treated and prosecuted as a criminal sexual offence, adding to a wider conversation on consent and women’s rights.
Volunteers have helped victims of online harassment file police complaints and stayed with cases through to action. When floods hit Vijayawada in 2024, OYSC teams were on the ground for rescue and relief.
In 2025 OYSC turned the manufacturing setback into policy work, drafting a briefing on chemical safety and misleading labels in commercial sanitary products to push for changes to Bureau of Indian Standards norms.
It has also begun promoting menstrual cups as the longer-lasting, zero-waste alternative the original project was reaching towards.
Sohan says the next front is water. Groundwater across several Andhra Pradesh districts including parts of Krishna close to Vijayawada has been flagged for contamination in recent years. It is exactly the sort of local, unglamorous problem OYSC has built its name on.