Beyond the sanitary pad tax

A boy needs one cloth. A girl needs two. Over time, more.

I have heard this answer across more than three decades of field research in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, across South Asia from women who had nothing to spare and no reason to be imprecise. It is not a statement about preference. It is an economic calculation. It contains more policy disappointment than any budget document I have read.

Budget 2026–27 has removed 18% sales tax on sanitary pads, menstrual products and contraceptives. A generation of young women candidly challenged enforced patriarchal positions on periods, bodies, autonomy, etc. These are now aggressively discoursed on social media platforms, and I am happy about it.

Thirty years after those field discussions, the cloth answer is unchanged. Technology has transformed. Social media has disrupted. The question worth asking is whether unfiltered reels have opened the talk without touching the structure beneath it or whether the visibility of some voices has made the invisibility of others easier to overlook.

What is the first real test of this announcement? Enforcement. The exemption exists in the Finance Bill, but its effect in the marketplace is not guaranteed.

Without active monitoring and enforcement of retail prices, manufacturers face no binding obligation to pass on the relief, meaning the promised savings may remain largely notional. Pakistan has a documented pattern of announcing fiscal relief that supply chains absorb silently. Without obligatory price accountability, this exemption will benefit balance sheets before it benefits women.

The second test is tougher. Pakistan has approximately 62 million women of menstruating age. A pack of ten sanitary pads costs around Rs450. Average monthly household income is approximately Rs33,000.

A 2024 study by UNICEF and WaterAid found that only 12% of women and girls in Pakistan use commercially produced sanitary pads. The remaining 88% rely on cloth or improvised materials, frequently without clean water, soap or any private sanitation.

Tax removal cannot reach the woman who could not afford the product before the tax existed. The 88% of Pakistani women remain exactly where they were before this budget was announced. This is not a secondary concern. That is the primary fact the statement apparently overlooked. This new tax-related measure has been introduced in the context of a broader policy gap, as Pakistan still lacks a comprehensive national menstrual health strategy to ensure consistent access to menstrual hygiene products, clean water, sanitation and education.

The exemption without a distribution system is a commitment that stops at the threshold. Free menstrual products in schools, government hospitals, bus terminals and railway stations must become policy, not aspiration. Pakistan has the institutional reach to do this. What it has lacked, consistently, is the political will.

Diapers must appear in the next budget. Children's diapers, and adult diapers used for elderly and disability care, are not luxuries. They remain taxed. Poor women carry these costs impalpably, and this budget has elected not to perceive them. Rural sanitation cannot persist as a separate conversation, always next, never now. A menstrual health policy that does not include a toilet in every village school is a policy built on nothing. These are not disconnected oversights. Each points to the same underlying problem: Pakistan's fiscal policy has never been built around the full range of women's economic realities. I documented this pattern sixteen years ago, and it has not changed.

In 2010, I published A Tax Break for Economic Freedom: The Case of Divorced Mothers, Divorced, Disabled and Never-Married (Above 40 Years) Pakistani Women with support from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The book argued that Pakistan's fiscal system does not simply neglect women, it neglects them selectively, in ways that reinforce existing social stigma. This is not an argument against the provisions extended to widows. Widows, too, in Pakistan face real hardship and their ordeals deserve full acknowledgment.

In Pakistani Muslim society, widowhood carries a recognised social status, and the state has compassionately translated that recognition into specific fiscal concessions: exemptions on property tax, preferential profit rates on National Savings Certificates.

The state's implicit justification for excluding divorced women from comparable relief is that Muslim family law provides them recourse nafaqah, or maintenance, and deferred mahr from the former husband. On paper, a divorced woman can claim financial support. In practice, this protection fails across economic classes. Not only poor women but educated urban women with far greater resources find enforcement unreliable, litigation unaffordable and family backing conditional at best. The law's promise seldom arrives.

Divorced mothers, disabled women and never-married women above forty carry equivalent or greater economic precarity alongside social stigma that widows, by and large, do not. The forty threshold is not arbitrary: in Pakistan, it marks the point at which society largely closes the door on first marriage.

Disabled women have some structural accommodations in law job quotas and assistive provisions, but these are not fiscal relief, and they are not comparable to what widows receive in tax and savings policy.

A woman who exits an abusive marriage or whose disability has constrained her income or who never married at all is penalised by a tax system that has no category for her as an independent economic person.

In 2010, the social development sector was organised around the same widow-centric logic. Sixteen years later, that bias persists inside government fiscal policy and inside the institutional priorities of civil society. Targeted income and property tax relief for divorced mothers, disabled women, and never-married women above forty was proposed and documented then. It has been met with institutional silence.

The cloth answer has not changed in thirty years. Pakistan's budget should.

PS: This piece challenges conventional reformist framing. It is not about comparing suffering. It is about how policy decides who counts and how those categories shape whose needs are seen and whose are ignored.