A ten-year-old girl in a Delhi school gets her period for the first time. She does not go to the clinic immediately. Instead, she quietly asks every girl around her if they have a pad. The clinic is the last resort.
Aanya Wig, 26, is the founder and managing director of Her Haq, a Delhi-based non-profit working on gender equality, menstrual health, and public policy. She started the organisation while still a student at Lady Shri Ram College and registered it as a trust in 2022.
What began as a community of girls within LSR has since expanded into a full-fledged organisation that runs awareness sessions, policy-linked research, community events, and a speaker series designed to bring gender conversations to people who are not already looking for them.
A Family That Showed Her What Women Could Do
Aanya’s path to gender work is rooted in a very personal reality. She grew up with her mother and elder sister, having lost her father when she was just a year old. Her mother was a school teacher who also took tuitions on the side, paid the bills, did the taxes, drove the car, and took tuitions at home. For Aanya, this was simply how life looked. Women did everything.
It was only as she grew older and began observing other families that the contrast became clear. Other households had sharp divisions in what the mother did and what the father did. Women were seen through the lens of their relationships, as mothers, sisters, partners, always somebody’s somebody.
“The world doesn’t look at women the same way that I do,” she says. “They don’t look at them as leaders. They always look at them as a mother or a sister or a partner. There’s always some identity attached to a woman.”
That realisation settled something early on for her. Whatever she did with her life, it had to be related to gender equality.
LSR And The Beginning of Her Haq
When Aanya joined the Lady Shri Ram College, she expected to dislike it. An all-girls environment felt limiting to her at first. Instead, she found it to be one of the most intellectually stimulating spaces she had been in. Women came to class in sports bras and in sarees on the same day. There was no gossip, she says, because there was nothing to gossip about. The conversations with her peers and seniors left her wanting to take that energy beyond the college walls.
She had already started volunteering with other non-profits during college and had founded a society called Aghaaz within LSR, focused on climate change and financial independence for women. She was also deeply motivated by the stigma around menstrual hygiene that she had encountered in schools, supposedly the modern private schools.
Her Haq started as a small community, only for girls at LSR. Then COVID hit. The organisation pivoted to digital campaigns and formed partnerships with UNHCR, distributing reusable sanitary napkins to women refugees from India and Afghanistan during the pandemic. When things opened up, so did Her Haq. Membership expanded beyond the college, men were included in the team and the work broadened.
In 2022, Aanya got the organisation formally registered as a Section 8 trust. The process, she says candidly, was far harder than she expected. There were no simple guides for a 21-year-old trying to register an NGO. She had to figure out legal paperwork, a CA, IP rights for the name and logo, a website, trustees. Her co-founder Sonia, now based in the USA and another trustee, Yati, helped her through it.
The Work: From Periods to Public Policy
Her Haq today operates across several areas. Its original work on menstrual hygiene continues through offline sessions where trained volunteers visit NGOs and community centres to speak with young people. The sessions cover not just health information but also practical, empathetic questions: how do you support someone at home who is menstruating? Can you make tea for them, buy pads for them, cook for them on difficult days?
The sessions also happen with boys, which was a deliberate and considered shift for Aanya. She had initially wondered how boys would engage with the subject. What she found, particularly among young men from marginalised communities, was openness and genuine curiosity. “Boys that are younger and especially come from marginalized communities, when you go online, they are more open and they’re more excited to talk about all of this,” she says.
The taboos had also evolved. The conversation was no longer just about whether a woman should touch a plant during her period. Boys were asking more intimate, nuanced questions about relationships and bodies, which, for Aanya, simply underlined how essential this work remained.
The organisation also does significant work on social media, running campaigns on gender equality across different themes.
Haq Charcha: Taking The Conversation Offline
Social media, she explains, is an echo chamber. The people who engage with Her Haq’s posts are already aligned with its values. That was not enough.
“After a point of time, I realized that I need to take these conversations offline,” she told The Logical Indian. So she started Haq Charchas, smaller events where one or more speakers are invited for a longer, moderated discussion on a gender-related topic. What makes these sessions different is the audience and the format. The speakers are not chosen only because they are gender activists. They are chosen because ordinary young people would want to hear them for any number of reasons, including career advice or curiosity. In one session, Her Haq invited the public policy head of Apple India. The gender conversation followed from there.
In another session, they called Anish Gawande, National Spokesperson of the NCP, and Pushpendra Saroj, the youngest member of Parliament, to talk about male allyship in public life. The audience included NGO kids Her Haq works with. A boy, barely fifteen, asked why he should look up to Shah Rukh Khan over Salman Khan if boys who cry are called weak. It was exactly the kind of question that Aanya wants these spaces to make room for.
The frustration behind Haq Charcha is specific. The mainstream gender discourse in India, she feels, stays confined to a circuit, the same PhDs, the same senior practitioners, the same auditoriums. An engineering student from some University is not part of that conversation. Neither is a first-generation learner at an NGO. Haq Charcha is designed for them.
The Annual Summit
Every year, Her Haq also hosts a larger event called the Haq Summit. It brings together journalists, IAS and IPS officers, young award recipients, and panellists to focus on a specific theme. The summit also features Haq Awards, which recognise young people working in areas related to that year’s theme.
Last year’s summit focused on the safety of women in the Delhi Metro. Her Haq filed an RTI to find out how many sexual harassment cases had been reported. The number they received was very low. And Aanya was not convinced. “In my mind, I was like, in a day, there must be more than 100 cases in the Delhi Metro.” The RTI also revealed that some camera-related information was simply withheld. The report that came out of this research made the case that the system itself includes a tiring process eventually discouraging women from reporting, by requiring victims to travel to a main station, identify the perpetrator, and file a formal police complaint.
On the ground, Her Haq has also run a pilot in Vasant Vihar in partnership with a local NGO, installing two sanitary napkin vending machines stocked with biodegradable pads sourced from women in economically vulnerable situations.
The pads are priced at four rupees each, which is significantly lower than buying a packet but preserves a sense of accountability that comes with a purchase. Government schemes that offer pads for one rupee exist, Aanya notes, but in her experience working with communities, she has barely met anyone who has actually accessed one, simply because of lack of awareness.
On Who This Problem Belongs To
Speaking to The Logical Indian, Aanya was pointed about what she sees as the distance between people who discuss these issues and the reality that exists just outside their door.
She also pushes back against the idea that gender inequality is more severe in poorer communities. In her experience, menstrual taboos are often more rigidly practiced in wealthier households, where domestic staff can make it easier for families to maintain and enforce such restrictions. Volunteers from well-off families have told her that their grandmothers do not allow women to enter the kitchen during their periods. In poorer households, there simply is no one else to cook.
On Young People in The Social Impact Space
Aanya stopped taking money from home at eighteen. At nineteen, while studying at LSR from morning to evening, she was doing night shifts at The Quint and weekend work to support herself. She never sat for campus placements. She was not interested in the highest packages her college offered.
This is relevant, she says, because the idea that social impact work belongs to either the very rich or the very late in life is simply wrong. You do not need to have retired from a career before you start caring about something. Young people can work in this sector, earn a living, and make an impact.
And for those who cannot commit full time, the option to contribute in small ways is always there. Teach your house help to use Paytm. Volunteer an evening a month. The point, she says, is to step outside the isolated bubble of one’s own life.
What She Wants For Her Haq
Aanya is finishing college and will look for a job soon. Her mother wants to retire and there is a household to help support.
But when she talks about what she wants for Her Haq, there is no ambiguity about the vision. “I want to run Her Haq full time. Right now I am finishing college and will find a job soon because I also need to financially sustain myself. So I don’t know how I will do this but I really want to. And I want to do it at a large scale. If I have the money, the resources, I would go beyond Delhi to Haryana, inner UP, Rajasthan. I would want to host these Charchas everywhere, because there are so many young people who are not a part of these conversations.”
The girl who grew up watching her mother do everything has spent the last several years trying to make sure that the conversation around what women can and cannot do reaches places it has not reached yet. She is twenty-six. She is just getting started.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe gender equality must move beyond conversations in privileged spaces and reach the everyday realities where stigma still shapes lives. Through Her Haq, Aanya Wig is creating those necessary spaces, where menstrual health, public safety, and gender justice are treated as shared social responsibilities, not private burdens.
But grassroots efforts alone are not enough. When will institutions match this urgency with action that truly makes dignity and equality accessible to all?
If you’d like us to feature your story, please write to us at csr@5w1h.media
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