A case study that wasn't really about a case study
The Niine Path Breakers Challenge was a national case-study competition focused on menstrual hygiene. On paper, that sounds like a marketing problem. In practice, it required understanding the social, cultural and behavioural barriers around menstrual hygiene in rural communities — and those barriers don't show up in a spreadsheet.
Going into the field
My team and I went into rural areas around Kharagpur and Medinipur to understand the problem directly, rather than guess at it from a classroom. I didn't know Bengali. A female teammate helped facilitate some of the conversations, but I pushed myself to personally engage, listen and understand rather than stay at the edge of it.
A personal barrier
This experience was meaningful to me for a reason that had nothing to do with the competition itself: before this, I had never openly discussed menstruation with my mother or sister. At around age 24, I consciously started asking questions about menstrual hygiene — first with my mother, then my sister and friends, and eventually with women in the communities we were trying to understand. That was a barrier I had to overcome in myself before I could do the work honestly.
What we found and built
Through local self-help groups, we found that women connected to community banking / self-help-group networks could act as trusted community connectors. That insight pointed us toward a model where women within the community could help create awareness and support distribution themselves, rather than an outside organisation doing it to them.
Our team obtained sanitary pads from the competition organisers after reaching out to them directly, and distributed them through community and self-help-group channels. We developed a roadmap and distribution model from that groundwork and presented our recommendations to the company. The team finished as national runners-up.
What actually mattered
The ranking isn't what makes this experience important to me. The most important learning was that a problem looks completely different once you leave the classroom and talk to the people experiencing it. I learned the importance of field research, how social context changes behaviour, how trust affects adoption, how difficult conversations require empathy, how community networks can become channels for change, and how business solutions need to respect people's lived realities.
The goal was never simply to hand someone a sanitary pad. It was helping women understand the need, enabling conversations within families, and letting awareness travel through the community on its own terms. The most personal part, for me, was learning to have a conversation about something I had previously found uncomfortable to even discuss.
I have LinkedIn posts and a video from this experience that I plan to add here as supporting material.