Blood Flow and Water Flow: How Climate Change Threatens Menstrual Health for Tribal Women in India

By Lalitha Shan

“We can live without food for some time,” one woman told me, “but how can we live without water?”

In the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu, this isn’t a rhetorical question; it’s a daily reality. In India’s southernmost state, where just 2.5% of the country's freshwater is available, tribal communities like the Irula live in a fragile balance with a disappearing resource. Water scarcity has long been part of life here, but climate change is making it worse. Groundwater levels are dropping, rainfall is unpredictable, and what water remains is increasingly spoken for by powerful industries.

Women collecting water for the next few days, anticipating a shortage or shutoff

In 2024, I spent time in the Karamadai block of Coimbatore District, visiting 14 tribal villages to understand how these changes affect women. It became clear that the most intimate aspects of their lives, especially menstrual health, are directly impacted. For menstruating women, the stakes are even higher. Nearly 30% of the women I spoke to said they couldn’t manage their periods hygienically because of limited water. The roots of this scarcity are complex. Large-scale agriculture and the ITC paper mill dominate groundwater use in the region, leaving domestic needs behind.

“When it comes to drinking water,” one woman in Kaaliyur said, “we have to sacrifice our work to fetch water... What do you do if there is no water for drinking? It is burdensome. We have to lose our work.”

Government tanks release water at unpredictable hours, forcing women to abandon paid work just to fetch enough for cooking and drinking. With the village’s six government borewells reduced to just one functional source, women often turn to private farms for water, where they face further restrictions.

“Even from the farms, we have to fetch water before six in the evening; otherwise, they switch on the electric fence,” one explained.

Another added, “They would say, ‘How could you fetch water from here when we ourselves do not have enough water?’ But we fetched water in spite of their scoldings.”

Others said they had to “sneak” water when no one was looking. Still, the supply was “inadequate” to manage menstruation with comfort or safety.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by 2050, nearly 40% of India’s population will face extreme water scarcity. Women tend to experience the adverse impacts of climate change differently then men, especially in regards to sexual and reproductive health. However, menstrual health is often under-prioritized in climate policies for adapting to and mitigating climate change. But periods don't stop just because the world in on fire; women, like the women in the Western Ghats, often need to adapt and find different ways to manage their reproductive and menstrual health amidst climate change.

These stories reveal a system that prioritizes industrial use and vague conservation efforts over the daily needs of women. Even well-intentioned water governance programs often ignore menstrual health entirely. Yet if we’re serious about climate adaptation and resilience, we cannot afford to overlook the women carrying the weight of this crisis, literally, on their heads, in buckets, across long distances. Climate change isn’t some distant threat for them; it’s here, bleeding into every part of life.