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India’s campaigning Miss World – BBC News

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A 20-year-old medical student turned her Miss World crown into a menstrual-health campaign that’s reaching villages across India.

Manushi Chhillar was crowned Miss World in Sanya, China, on November 18, 2017, becoming the sixth Indian woman to win the title and pulling India level with Venezuela for the most Miss World crowns of any country. Rather than treat the sash as a photo-op, the medical student has spent her reign pushing a subject most pageants avoid: periods. Her platform, an extension of a grassroots project she started before she ever won the crown, has taken her from rural villages to Mumbai’s Dharavi settlement handing out sanitary pads and running hygiene workshops.

• Chhillar beat out 129 other contestants and won the pageant’s “Beauty with a Purpose” award in 2017 for Project Shakti, a menstrual-health initiative she ran across 20 villages that directly reached more than 5,000 women.
• In February 2018, she launched a multi-city “Beauty with a Purpose” tour through New Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Mumbai’s Dharavi settlement, distributing low-cost biodegradable sanitary pads and leading in-person workshops.
• The campaign later expanded beyond India, with outreach programs running in Indonesia and South Africa.

Project Shakti Started Before the Crown

Chhillar’s advocacy didn’t begin the night she won in Sanya — it’s what got her there. Project Shakti, her entry for the “Beauty with a Purpose” competition, was built around a simple problem: women in rural India often can’t get sanitary products, and when they can, cultural taboos keep them from talking about it. Her team worked in 20 villages, reaching more than 5,000 women directly with education sessions and access to pads, and the judges rewarded the project with the pageant’s humanitarian award before she’d even claimed the crown itself.

Taking the Tour to Dharavi

Once crowned, Chhillar didn’t shelve the project — she scaled it. Starting in early February 2018, she joined the Miss World Organization and a group of reigning continental queens for a dedicated humanitarian tour across India, with stops in New Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and, notably, Mumbai’s Dharavi settlement. At each stop she met students, ran hygiene workshops and handed out low-cost, biodegradable sanitary pads — a direct response to a well-documented public health gap where limited infrastructure and high pad prices have historically pushed rural women toward unhygienic substitutes like old rags, sand and even ash.

Menstruation should be treated as a natural biological function, not a source of shame.

Making the Case for Policy, Not Just Charity

Chhillar’s message throughout the tour went beyond handing out supplies. She’s pushed for nationwide policy support — subsidized sanitary products and hygiene education built into school curriculums — arguing that charity alone can’t fix a problem this widespread. It’s the kind of advocacy that’s earned her coverage well outside the usual pageant press, including a dedicated BBC News segment tracking her campaign as it moved city to city, an unusual amount of scrutiny for a beauty queen with a one-year term.

The Campaign Goes Global

The “Beauty with a Purpose” effort didn’t stop at India’s borders. Chhillar’s team has since run awareness and outreach programs in Indonesia and South Africa, carrying the same core message — that access to basic hygiene shouldn’t depend on where a woman happens to be born. For a title that typically expires the moment a new winner is crowned, it’s turned into one of the more substantive uses of a Miss World platform in years, the kind of story that sits closer to public health reporting than pageant coverage.

Chhillar hands off the Miss World crown in December 2018, but Project Shakti was never built to expire with her reign — the villages she reached, and the workshops still running in Dharavi and beyond, are the actual measure of whether this campaign outlasted the sash.