Aditi Gupta turned a design-school thesis into a comic book that teaches girls about periods in 22+ countries

When Aditi Gupta got her first period at twelve in Jharkhand, she was handed a small set of rules that millions of Indian girls would recognise. Do not enter the kitchen. Do not touch the pickle. Do not enter the temple. Wash your cloth where no one can see it. As she explained later in a widely shared TED talk, that was not her sex education. It was, in some sense, the only information she got.

A decade and a half later, the same Aditi Gupta, by then a New Media Design student at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, turned that absence into a graduation project. The project grew into Menstrupedia, the colourful, classroom-friendly comic book that teaches Indian girls about menstruation and that is now used in more than twenty countries.

A design project, not a campaign

Most public-health interventions about menstruation begin either as donor-led campaigns or as product launches. The Menstrupedia book began as something more useful: a piece of design research. As an NID student, Gupta studied how Indian girls actually first hear about menstruation, what information they receive, and what shame or confusion that information leaves behind.

What came out of the research was that the format was as important as the content. Girls would not read a textbook chapter or sit through a clinical lecture, but they would read a comic book. So Gupta and her partner Tuhin Paul built one. The Menstrupedia comic uses three friendly characters, Pinki, Jiya and Mira, and a guide called Priya didi, who walks the reader through the biology and the practicalities of menstruation in plain language.

From self-publishing to scale

The first edition of the Menstrupedia comic was published in 2014, after a successful crowdfunding campaign. From there, the team built a small Ahmedabad-based publishing operation, began translating the book into multiple Indian languages, and licensed the material to schools, governments and NGOs. Over the years, the comic and its accompanying website have spread across many more languages and territories, including South-East Asia, parts of Africa, and Latin America.

The business model is intentionally modest. Menstrupedia is designed to be embedded into the curriculum, distributed in bulk to schools, and used by partner organisations. The founders have spoken publicly about prioritising reach over margin.

The TED moment

Gupta’s TED talk, in which she walked through her own first period and the comic that grew out of it, became one of the most-watched Indian women-led TED talks of its time. It opened up a series of partnerships with state governments, school boards and large NGOs.

For most viewers, the talk was probably the first time they had heard someone discuss menstruation with neither shame nor melodrama, just as a piece of biology that deserved a good user manual.

Why this is a founder story, not just an NGO story

It is tempting to file Menstrupedia under “social enterprise” and move on. That framing misses what makes the company genuinely interesting from a founder’s point of view. Menstrupedia is a product company that happens to operate in a public-health domain. It designs, prototypes, ships and iterates on a piece of media, much like any consumer-publishing company would.

The fact that the product is a comic about periods, rather than an app about productivity, does not change the underlying discipline. If anything, it makes the discipline more visible.

“Half the world menstruates, and half the world has been taught not to talk about it. That is, at some level, a design problem.”

What founders can take from the Menstrupedia story

Menstrupedia is the rare Indian founder story where the medium, a printed comic book, is the moat. The team spent its early years on craft and clarity rather than on scale.

The lesson, then, is more about taste than tactics. Founders working on sensitive or stigmatised subjects often over-engineer the seriousness of the experience and under-engineer the joy. The Menstrupedia comic is joyful, and that is precisely why it teaches.

The unit economics question

Most Indian D2C reads concentrate on per-customer economics. The Menstrupedia model resists that lens, because the unit of value is not really a single customer, it is a school, a state curriculum, or a partner NGO. A single licensing relationship can put the comic into thousands of classrooms, which is why the company can operate as a small, focused team in Ahmedabad rather than as a venture-backed scaling operation. For founders comparing consumer and institutional sales motions, Menstrupedia is a useful reminder that institutional sales scale on a different curve, and need a different product cadence to match.

Frequently asked questions about Aditi Gupta

Who founded Menstrupedia and how did it begin?

Menstrupedia was founded in Ahmedabad in 2012 by Aditi Gupta and her partner Tuhin Paul, originally as Aditi’s graduation project at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. The project began as design research into how Indian girls actually first hear about menstruation and what information they receive, and grew into a published comic book the following year. The founders self-published the first edition with help from a crowdfunding campaign, and built up Menstrupedia into a small Ahmedabad-based operation that designs, prints and distributes the comic and its supporting curriculum.

Why is the Menstrupedia comic considered effective?

The format is the strategic choice. Indian girls in the target age group, by Gupta’s research, would not read a textbook chapter or sit through a clinical lecture, but would read a comic book. The Menstrupedia comic uses three friendly characters, Pinki, Jiya and Mira, and a guide called Priya didi, who walks the reader through biology, hygiene and practicalities in plain language. The choice to be cheerful rather than clinical is what teachers and NGOs repeatedly report as the reason the format works in classrooms.

How does Menstrupedia distribute its work?

The business model is intentionally distribution-first rather than direct-to-consumer. Menstrupedia licenses the comic and its companion materials to schools, state governments and NGOs, with bulk distribution into school programmes. The book has been translated into multiple Indian languages and is in use in more than 20 countries. Gupta has been clear in interviews that the team prioritises reach over per-unit margin, an unusual stance in venture-backed Indian D2C, but coherent for a product whose value is unlocked by being inside a curriculum.

Why does this matter as a founder story, not just an NGO story?

Menstrupedia is product-led, not campaign-led. It designs, prototypes, prints and iterates on a piece of media with the same discipline a consumer-publishing company would use, even though its subject is a public-health one. The fact that the product is a comic about periods rather than a productivity app does not change the underlying craft. If anything, it makes the craft more visible, because the stakes for clarity, age-appropriateness and tone are higher. That is the reason Menstrupedia gets read as a founder story on this site.

What is Aditi Gupta’s net worth?

There is no net-worth figure for Aditi Gupta from a reputable, independently-verifiable source. Menstrupedia is a social enterprise (she is a Forbes India 30 Under 30 honoree, 2014); there is no meaningful or reported personal net-worth figure. The numbers that appear on celebrity or “net worth” aggregator sites are unsourced and inconsistent, so, in line with our editorial policy,