Desai Foundation’s Megha Desai on the Lotus Festival, Menstrual Equity and Empowering Women in India

Desai Foundation is about, what, 28 years old, started by my friend, Sameer Desai. And I have been involved with it ever since, I mean, involved from the very beginning, but more formally as a board member, since they decided to go public foundation as compared to a private foundation. And I've been on the board for 15, 18, 20 years. I don't even recall how long I've been involved. I admired what they've done because giving money is easy, you know, giving, you know, donations aren't actually easy to do, but actually getting work done, getting it executed, and really delivering outcomes is very, very challenging for organizations. And one thing that Desai Foundation has done really well over the years, which I've always admired, is an ability to get things done. The force, the execution machine that they've created here in the U.S. and in India is simply amazing. And that's thanks to Sam Desai, who was a great operator and has laid down the good foundation. Now that same team has been carrying on now as Mega has taken over for the past few years and continue to double down on that execution engine and really deliver the outcomes. And today, as many people might know, they've touched 13 million lives in, what, eight states in India. And the work they're doing around women and children is simply amazing. Welcome to Indian Union News. Our guest today is Megha Desai, President of Desai Foundation. Megha, welcome to our studio. Thank you for having me. Sure, excellent. So Megha, you have been President of Desai Foundation for the last 13 years. Yeah. And I think in the last 13 years, you were very close to hitting almost 13 million people, affecting their lives. What a coincidence. Yeah. And Desai Foundation services have really expanded a lot in the last decade or so. Yeah. So if you can tell our viewers that what Desai Foundation does and all the different programs. I love that. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. So the Desai Foundation believes in holistic community development, which means that when you're entering into a rural village, we want people to be able to live healthy lives, be able to get a job and be able to live with dignity. And so for us, that breaks out into three different verticals, health, meaning health access, screening and information, livelihood, meaning skilling, but then also banking, savings, entrepreneurship, as well as menstrual health. So ensuring that they can live with dignity. And of course, menstrual health is also around health and economics, right? So menstrual health touches upon all of our goals. So these are the three verticals in which we work. We have about 33 programs that we offer in all three of these different verticals. So now about that part of the business side of Desai, was it from the beginning or it was added later on? And how did you come up with that idea? You know, initially the Desai Foundation was a family foundation and operated very much like that, where we were writing checks to other organizations. But what we really wanted to do was scale and make a deeper impact. And so for us, what we started to do is build and implement scalable programs. And I think what's been really nice and unique about the Desai Foundation is because it's founded by two entrepreneurs, we approach every pilot and every expansion with entrepreneurship in mind. So the ability to be able to try something really quickly, experiment, fail, iterate, and which has allowed us to expand rather quickly to so many different verticals of programming and even so many different regions. So that is kind of the way that we think about our expansion and how we implement programs. And talking about the METRO program, which I think you guys are really known for. And I think it was last year that the Indian Supreme Court also played, finally gave a stamp that, okay, go ahead, this is a great thing to do. So just talk about that as well. So one of my favorite topics to talk about. So it was actually this year, January 30th, 2026. Yeah, just this year. The Indian Supreme Court has deemed that menstrual health and equity is a human right, which means that every girl and boy in schools, public or private across India has to be given menstrual education, access to free pads, access to a safe and private bathroom. And there's more to that regulation, but that is what's really exciting. The Desai Foundation has been doing this for well over 15 years, and it's a lot of validation that we're getting this Supreme Court ruling. But what that also means is that implementation is gonna be incredibly important. So what does that look like on the ground? It's something that we've already been doing. So we're ready to go. We already have contracts with three different states. So we're gonna start implementing our Asani Sanitary Napkin Program, our awareness sessions, et cetera, across these three states right away. And so tell us a little bit, how did it work? Like if you manufacture, you contract, or how much resources Desai Foundation devotes to such an important cause? Yeah, this is our biggest program at the Desai Foundation. So our Asani Sanitary Napkin Program is proprietary to the Desai Foundation. We have built it from the ground up over the last 15 years. We produce and manufacture our own sanitary napkin pads that are retail quality and meet all the health standards that are required across India. We distribute those pads through a network of Singhinis. And at both layers, these are women from the village that are serving their community. So we're creating jobs along the way as well. And what's been so exciting about watching this program grow is not just the hands-on, one-on-one community that's built from Asani, but it's also this large, rich network of awareness. One of our big tasks is around breaking down the stigmas of menstruation. You know, in a lot of these rural communities, women are still not allowed to enter the home or to cook or to pray. And so we get to be a part of breaking down these stigmas. It's remarkable to think back at where society was and where it is today. I still think we have a long way to go. The stigmas that surround menstruation can be life-threatening. And I'll give you a couple examples. We think about the hardships that our mother and our grandparents went through. But today, in current society, lack of education can literally lead to death. There was a 12-year-old girl last year in India that was murdered by her 30-year-old brother because she started menstruating at the age of 12. He didn't know anything about menstruation. The only time he'd ever seen anyone bleed from that part of their body was after he had had intercourse with his wife for the first time. So he made this brash assumption that his 12-year-old sister had started having intercourse out of wedlock and to save and honor the family, murdered her. There's another example of when a young new bride was welcoming her in-laws to her family for the first time to perform Lakshmi Puja. She got her period that morning and basically said, oh my gosh, I can't perform the one function that I'm supposed to perform the first time my in-laws come to visit. And she killed herself. These are real stories and these are real things that are happening. And even in my own house, I grew up in a very modern Hindu family here in the United States. My grandmother and I argued about my audacity to pray when I was bleeding. And so these stigmas, what they can do is they really, really put a hamper on a girl's education, a girl's ability to live with dignity and autonomy, and a girl's ability to earn. I strongly believe that menstrual equity is not just a women's issue, it's a GDP issue. Because you're having a lot more people not graduate from school, so the literacy rate suffers, and then participate in the economy. And so for us, menstrual equity is kind of the end all, be all in terms of advancing a society. And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of other issues. But for us, we know this is something we can solve. And so, and we can see the society, we can imagine the society that will thrive. And actually, the Sai Foundations, this sanitary program, for the first time, I heard of a non-profit which is really focusing on this issue in India. And before that, I was not really aware of this issue. When I was in JNU, Jawaharlal Nehru University, doing my master's and all these weird classmates and all those things, but we had absolutely no idea about any of these things. And now reflecting back, we think, my God, what sacrifice and what a great service this napkin program is there. And I'm so glad that the Indian Supreme Court has recognized that. Yeah, we were really thrilled. Excellent, that's a great job. Now let's come back to the holistic health part. Yes. So tell us about what the Sai Foundation does there. So in terms of the health programs, we have about a dozen different health programs. Some of them are really simple interventions like anemia screening and testing, diabetes screening and testing. Some of them are a little bit more involved. Like we have this great new program called Vision on Wheels where we've created an entire eye clinic in a small minibus that goes out into the most rural communities to provide people with spectacles, do cataract surgeries, et cetera. India has a very high rate of cataract because it's not really common practice to wear sunglasses or protect your eyes. So people, especially in dusty villages are getting a lot of film and a lot of injuries are happening because of it. And so some people don't even know that they have poor vision, right? So they'll go get a job in a factory and then hurt themselves. So for us, this Vision on Wheels program has been such a great expansion. And then one of my favorite health programs that we have is called the Bal Health Mela. And it's a 1,000 person fair in the middle of a town square where we have games and bouncy houses and music. And then we have 16 different stalls that all the children filter through. We can usually hold about a thousand kids. And they filter through and they learn things. They learn about how to eat better, how to clean their teeth better, good touch, bad touch. They learn a variety of different things so they can carry that learning with them as they grow. And so we really thought hard about how to provide health interventions that will carry with them through not just one intervention, but the next year. Can you also talk about the, I know the Desai Foundation started in Gujarat. And so how it has grown geographically in India. Yeah, so we're now in eight states, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. And what's been so unique about the way that we've grown is we've actually been invited to all of the regions in which we've expanded. And what that means is that there is a local leader or a priest or a community member that has said, oh, we saw what you did in Maharashtra. Can you please come here and do it? That's how we ended up in Orissa. There was a priest that heard about what we were doing in menstrual health from our work in Gujarat and asked us to come down to Tamil Nadu. And so what that does is that when you already have a stakeholder that cares about your success, it allows us to enter into a community, assess the need really quickly and expand. And so that has been really a wonderful way for us to grow and expand. And we welcome any connections. So if you know a community leader in a village that needs some of our programming, introduce us. And they can be here too in the US or India or anywhere. Absolutely. So now many nonprofit organizations who are active in India, they connect with other nonprofit organizations in India and they do service, whatever they do. How is Desai Foundation different when it comes to the operations part in India? So our team in India is about 55 people strong. We have a network of 500 heroes for humanity that help us implement our programming. And then we have a network of about a thousand Sanghinis that sell and distribute our sanitary napkin pads. Because of the law and because of the way that the tax structure needs to work, we have a US entity and an India entity. The India entity handles the programming as well as 50% of the fundraising. And then the Desai Foundation here leads fundraising as well as marketing and kind of communications. But we are really proud at the Desai Foundation that 50% of our funding comes from in-country in India. And so it's really lovely to see that the programs we've chose to implement have such a great buy-in from the local people. And so that's been really, really lovely to see as we've grown. And those who are not familiar with the Heroes for Humanity program, if you can explain that. Yeah, so our Heroes for Humanity program was born actually out of the pandemic. And when we really needed just more hands on the ground to help us implement our work. And so we had a crazy idea where we would go into the communities that we already worked, identify people that had maybe lost their jobs that were capable otherwise, but just hadn't had lost their jobs or didn't have the opportunity, train them and deploy them. We thought this was gonna be a temporary program because we thought we'd build the heroes through the pandemic. But it's provided such an incredible tool for us to implement all of our other programs that after five, six years, we're still continuing the Heroes for Humanity program. And what's great about the program is that they're part-time workers, right? So they're getting paid for their service. They're retrained every three months. So one month they can do a diabetes screening, the next time they can do a banking and savings initiative. And so we're able to retrain them. So we have this army of a thousand trained heroes that should the next disaster happen, should the next pandemic happen, we can activate them like this. And it's a really incredible tool of community health organized workers that we're really proud to work with. Now, is there any, do you also work with the government of India and support from them or? Yeah, so we haven't engaged with any cash exchanges with the Indian government, but the Indian government is always important in helping unlock doors. So there are a lot of initiatives that we have in local schools that we work with the local governments to give us access to those schools. So for example, our health and hygiene programs, our Asani sanitary napkin programs, we wouldn't be able to do those in those government schools without working with the government. But that's, so we've been partnering with the government in that regard. So earlier you mentioned that the 50% funding is comes from India itself. Yeah. So, which is not easy, but people have to be really motivated to do that. So who are some of, also you get funding by the corporations there in India if you can give some examples, some are big supporters. Yeah. So the way that the funding in India mostly works now is through the CSR, right? Which is Corporate Social Responsibility, which is now a law in India. And so corporations of specific sizes have to give a portion of their proceeds, right? To the nonprofits. And we've worked with so many incredible organizations like, you know, SCORE SE, we've worked with TE Connectivity, we've worked with Mahindra, we're about to work with Tata. Megha, if you, all the programs and initiatives you talked about, and if somebody is watching this and they get excited about, you know, either the master's program or, you know, the entrepreneurship or, I love this, the heroes program as well. And I say, I really want to start something like that, either in their village or town in India, or they can, how they can help or support, or how can get some support from Desai Foundation as well in services. How they can get involved with Desai Foundation? Yeah, I mean, the easiest way is to reach out to us. We are in eight states already, so we may not be that far from your community. And so we are always looking for new communities to expand to. So reach out to us and, you know, we'd love to bring these services to your community. We are a programmatic organization. So for us, all we need is a community and a group of beneficiaries that are ready, willing, and able, and a little bit of funding. So that is kind of where we can go. The Desai Foundation is really proud to be a really efficient organization from a financial perspective. And it's because of our heroes and because of the way that we've structured our fundraising. And then I mentioned that we have a lot of local support. So the local support allows us to spread a dollar really far because a lot of times the infrastructure that we are using to host our programs is donated to us, or a local community will donate food. So we're not actually spending every single cent that is donated on those things, right? We're able to treat more people or to include more people in the vocational training programs, et cetera. So I think it's really exciting when people come to us and say, hey, we want you to come to our community and our village. So talking about that, I know Desai Foundation started here. This is the heart of Desai Foundation here. Who are some of the people who have been really working with you and really quite closely involved with the Desai Foundation? Yeah, you know, we're so grateful for the Boston community given that this is kind of where it was born, but also it's the community that has really supported us and showed us that we can't do this alone, right? And so we've been so, so grateful to incredible supporters like Amar and Deepika Soni, who have been incredible supporters. Yash and Jigna Shah, who have been incredibly supportive. Santana and Namita have been incredibly supportive. There's a whole host of incredible couples, families here that have been incredibly supportive. A lot of our community has come out to visit the work. Chandu uncle, before he passed away, and his shiny auntie came out to the villages and were able to see the work that they were doing firsthand and have since been participating in it. And so we really want to do this with all of you. You know, the idea is that this is not a family foundation. It may have started with a family, but it's all of your heart and soul and vision that brings it to life. And so we're really excited to have this Boston community be such a vital part of it. So Megha, one of the initiatives for fundraising in Boston by the SAI Foundation has been the Lotus Festival. And it has come to be known as a place because all the time you get fantastic venues and the locations and the event is absolutely fantastic. So I know the 12th annual Lotus Festival is coming here in Boston. Tell us about that and the location and fun thing. Absolutely. So it's this year on October 10th. We're really excited to welcome all of the Boston community to join us. And as you mentioned, we're kind of known for mixing up the locations, whether it's an airplane hangar or in the Peabody Essex Museum. But this year, you know, to come- Our Omni Hotel. Or the Omni Hotel, yep. And as a nod to our AFC Championship Patriots, we are hosting at Gillette Stadium this year. And so we're super, super excited to bring the excitement to Gillette. And what's really fun and spirited about having it at Gillette Stadium is it's such a feeling of innovation, of excellence and of camaraderie, right? To bring everyone together. So we're really excited. We have great artists and great speakers lined up for you and so many wonderful surprises. So we're really excited to invite and welcome all of you to Gillette Stadium. Excellent, looking forward to and see you there on October 10th. Yes, excited to see you. Thank you, Upendra. Thank you.