Every BPL woman and adolescent girl in Haryana should receive free, quality sanitary pads — and every Anganwadi centre still running out of a rented room should get its own building. Those were the blunt orders Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini issued on Friday, 25 September 2026, after a top-level review of the Women and Child Development Department's schemes.

What the review directed — building by building, pad by pad

The Chief Minister's Office stated that Saini directed officials to fast-track the provision of dedicated buildings for Anganwadi centres currently operating out of rented premises — a long-standing gap in the state's grassroots welfare infrastructure. Officials were told to identify available land on government and school premises to construct new centres, treating the task as a priority rather than a routine administrative exercise.

On menstrual health, Saini reviewed the Mahila Evam Kishori Samman Yojana — Haryana's scheme for providing free sanitary napkins to eligible BPL women and girls — and ordered that quality standards be enforced strictly across all products. He asked officials to ensure proper registration of beneficiaries, maintain transparent distribution records, and guarantee availability through Jan Aushadhi Kendras and schools in both rural and urban areas.

The directive went further: wherever needed, dispensing machines are to be installed so access does not depend on a staffed counter or a fixed distribution window. The emphasis on machines signals a shift from periodic distribution drives toward always-on availability.

The infrastructure gap behind the order

Anganwadi centres, established under the national Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme since 1975, are the bedrock of child nutrition and maternal health at the village level. In Haryana, a significant share of these centres still operate from rented buildings, limiting their permanence, capacity, and community trust. Shifting them to purpose-built or government-owned spaces is both a fiscal-efficiency and a service-quality argument.

The Jan Aushadhi Kendras — central government outlets that supply affordable generic medicines and health products — have become a convenient last-mile channel for sanitary pads in states that have plugged them into women-welfare pipelines. Haryana's instruction to route supply through these centres, alongside schools, reflects an attempt to use existing infrastructure rather than build parallel chains.

Delivery records and accountability as the real test

The sharpest signal from the review was the insistence on registration and distribution records. Welfare schemes that lack auditable beneficiary data routinely leak — pads don't reach girls, buildings stall in land disputes, and numbers on paper outpace reality on the ground. By making record-keeping an explicit directive, the Chief Minister's Office is, in effect, setting up a future accountability framework.

Whether district-level officials translate these instructions into measurable timelines — how many rented Anganwadi centres get land identified, how many dispensing machines get installed by when — will determine whether Friday's review becomes a course-correction or a ceremonial box-tick.