During a street play in the Bahraich region near the Nepal border, Ankit Bihari asked an elderly woman what she used during menstruation. She said she used polythene. Then he asked what a condom was used for. She told him it was used to stop periods.
That moment stayed with him. It crystallised something he had been sensing for years, working in communities across India: that the gap between government schemes and the ground reality was enormous, and that the most dangerous part of that gap was silence.
Today, Ankit Bihari is the co-founder of Dreams Peace Foundation, a Lucknow-based organisation working on menstrual health awareness, child safety, and livelihood support in underserved communities. He grew up in Bihar, moved to Lucknow at age 12, and found his footing through a children’s group run by World Vision India. Those early years took him across 19 states, gave him a career in street theatre, and eventually brought him face to face with a silence he could not ignore.
From Chhapra, Bihar to 19 States
Ankit was born in Chhapra, Bihar. When he moved to Lucknow in 2004, his basic education continued there while his earlier schooling had been in Bihar. It was in Lucknow that he was introduced to World Vision India through their children’s group.
“They basically nourished us,” he told The Logical Indian. “And they sent us to multiple states for workshops. They even built leadership skills in us. If I may say, they sent us to 19 states to build leadership skills.”
Those years shaped him in more ways than one. Travelling across states, doing street plays with Caritas India and World Vision India, and working alongside Delhi’s organization Sambhawana Natya Manch, he picked up languages organically. Bhojpuri from Bihar, Bengali from artists he worked with, and a smattering of Odia, Rajasthani, and others from his time in different regions. He credits these organisations for giving him the linguistic range that would later allow him to connect directly with communities where outsiders often cannot.
The idea to start his own organisation came from observing the difference between policy-level work and what actually happened on the ground. He saw that individuals could do community work without institutional backing, but having an organisation meant having representation and authority. “The sole reason to make an organisation was that you get an authority. It was just a simple idea.”
Seeing the Gap Up Close
Before starting Dreams Peace Foundation in 2019, Ankit had been watching a specific problem unfold during his years with World Vision. In one of their livelihood programmes, the organisation distributed resources to families, including carts, rickshaws, petty shop materials and sewing machines. Ankit was part of the team doing follow-up surveys.
What he found was unsettling. Three months after distribution, he visited a few households and found sewing machines hanging from the roof, unused. Carts lying broken by the side. Rickshaws that had been sold.
“Those who needed it, got it. Those who didn’t need it, also got it,” he said. The distribution had happened without sufficient groundwork to understand whether families had the skills, the context, or the circumstances to use what they had been given. That gap, he decided, was what he wanted to address.
The foundation he co-founded with Shiva Kumar began by focusing on life skills and leadership building. In two years, they trained 3500 families in Lucknow, producing 116 leaders from within those communities and giving them the work of strengthening their own neighbourhoods.
The Bahraich Wake-Up Call and the Birth of Project Chuppi
Ankit had been doing street plays in the Bahraich block near the Nepal border repeatedly between 2019 and 2023. The area is a migration corridor where people from Purvanchal, UP, Bihar and even West Bengal have settled. Because he speaks Bhojpuri and his team included Bengali-speaking artists, they were able to reach communities that most outsiders could not.
On one of those visits, the conversations about menstrual health opened up in a way he had not anticipated. He found that government-subsidised pads priced at Rs. 10 were not available in nearby markets. Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers, meant to be the last-mile link between government health programmes and communities, did not always have adequate information or supplies themselves. And women in those villages were using polythene during their periods.
“People were using polythene pads in that area,” he said, describing the finding as one of the most shocking he had encountered. “They even told us that Asha didi comes there and she herself doesn’t have enough information to tell us, or to provide us pads.”
The response to misinformation about condoms was equally jarring. “They told us that condoms are used to stop periods. If there is such misinformation and such things, what should I say?”
His team made a documentary about what they found. It is available on YouTube. And from that experience, Project Chuppi was born. The initiative, whose name means silence in Hindi, works to break the silence around menstrual health through structured awareness sessions and the distribution of dignity kits in underserved communities. Crucially, it includes men and boys in every session, recognising that behaviour change cannot happen in a room that excludes half the household.
Why Behaviour Change Takes Generations
Ankit speaks about awareness work with a patience that comes from experience. Myths around menstruation, he says, have been passed down for generations. The rules about not entering the kitchen or temple during periods, he explains, have historical context. Temples were built at a distance from homes. Kitchens required manual labour such as grinding spices by hand. Women were exempted from physically demanding tasks during menstruation for practical reasons. But those exemptions changed into stigma and the reasoning behind them was lost.
“Things that have been going on for the last 3-4 generations: to get rid of it, it will take 4-5 more generations,” he says.
In conversations with The Logical Indian, he described a session in a Lucknow government school where a student said, “The blood that comes, my mother says it is dirty blood. So, after touching it, the number of times you bleed, you will have to take a bath.”
His approach is not to push back hard in a single session and expect change. Instead, he returns. He does 2-3 sessions with the child and then follows up with the family. He treats it as a slow, steady shift, not a one-time intervention.
A Short Film, Nine Languages, and an All-India Bike Ride
Dreams Peace Foundation is currently in the fundraising stage for Phase 2 of Project Chuppi. The centrepiece of this phase is a short film that will be dubbed in nine languages and screened across India. And Ankit plans to carry out every single one of those screenings himself, on a bike.
He will leave Lucknow and ride across the country, stopping to screen the film and hold awareness sessions along the way. The route spans every region. In the north, it covers cities like Rishikesh, Chandigarh, and Rewari. In the west, it passes through Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur, and on to Mumbai and Pune. In the south, the plan takes him through Bangalore, Kochi, and Chennai. In the east and through Odisha, cities like Bhubaneswar, Sambalpur, and Koraput are on the list. In the northeast, Guwahati, Tezpur, and Shillong are included. Bihar and Jharkhand get extensive coverage too, with stops planned across Patna, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, and several smaller towns in between.
When asked why he believes cinema is a more powerful tool than sessions alone, Ankit pointed to something most Indians would recognise. “In India, the culture of cinema is a very big culture. You watch a movie and it sits in your mind.” He added, “If they are able to visualise things, then more things will sit in their mind.”
He offered a simple illustration: “If I say Dhurandar, then Dhurandar will come in two parts. Everyone remembers all the songs and scenes of Dhurandar. And if this subject was in the book, then how many people would remember it?”
NSS Odisha is expected to come on as a core partner for the Odisha leg of the tour. In Kerala, Better Life Foundation India is already a confirmed collaboration partner.
Making Pads from Textile Waste
Beyond Project Chuppi, the foundation is also developing a livelihood programme that ties directly into the menstrual health work. The plan is to involve women in Lucknow’s slums, who often lack access to paid work, in manufacturing cotton pads made from textile waste. The pads would then be distributed at minimal or no cost to women in those same communities who lack access to commercial pads.
It is a small cycle, but a deliberate one: addressing both the livelihood gap and the health gap with the same initiative.
The foundation also supports child protection work, building on the model that World Vision India has established across 40 slums in Lucknow, where child protection units exist in each community. Dreams Peace Foundation conducts workshops to strengthen those units.
Silence Is the Biggest Barrier
Dreams Peace Foundation’s guiding belief, as Ankit has put it, is straightforward: “Silence is the biggest barrier. The day we start talking openly, half the problem is already solved.”
The foundation has reached over 3,200 individuals, conducted 64 sessions, distributed more than 2,600 pads, and covered 200 kilometres of field travel. These are not headline-grabbing numbers. But for an organisation that has deliberately chosen to work slowly, return repeatedly, and measure what it does, they reflect a considered approach to lasting change.
Ankit Bihari is not trying to fix everything at once. He is trying to start conversations that, he believes, will take several generations to fully settle into behaviour. He is also planning to ride a bike across India to do it.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
For too long, menstrual health has been treated as a subject too uncomfortable to name, let alone discuss openly. The shame around it is not natural. It was built, passed down, and quietly accepted by generations who did not know better.
Ankit Bihari’s work is a reminder that awareness is not a luxury but a basic right, and that the communities most in need are often the last to receive it. At The Logical Indian, we believe that a society which cannot talk about half its population’s health is a society that has chosen silence over dignity. It is time we chose differently.
Do you think menstrual health should be made a compulsory part of school education across India?
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