Budget 2026-27 has removed the 18% sales tax on sanitary pads, menstrual products, and contraceptives. However, this measure alone fails to address the reality that 88% of women and girls in Pakistan still rely on cloth or improvised materials during menstruation, according to a 2024 study by UNICEF and WaterAid. The tax exemption, while welcome, does not reach those who could not afford the products before the tax existed.
Enforcement remains the first real test
Without active monitoring and enforcement of retail prices, manufacturers face no binding obligation to pass on the relief. Pakistan has a documented pattern of announcing fiscal relief that supply chains absorb silently. The exemption in the Finance Bill may remain largely notional unless accompanied by obligatory price accountability.
Pakistan has approximately 62 million women of menstruating age. A pack of ten sanitary pads costs around Rs450, while average monthly household income is approximately Rs33,000. The 88% of women who cannot afford commercial pads remain exactly where they were before this budget.
Broader policy gap persists
This tax-related measure has been introduced without a comprehensive national menstrual health strategy. Free menstrual products in schools, government hospitals, bus terminals, and railway stations must become policy, not aspiration. Rural sanitation and toilet facilities in every village school are essential components that remain unaddressed.
Diapers for children and adults used for elderly and disability care remain taxed, despite not being luxuries. Poor women carry these costs impalpably, and this budget has elected not to perceive them.
Fiscal policy selectively neglects women
Pakistan's fiscal system has never been built around the full range of women's economic realities. Widows receive tax exemptions on property tax and preferential profit rates on National Savings Certificates, reflecting their recognised social status. However, divorced mothers, disabled women, and never-married women above forty face equivalent or greater economic precarity without comparable relief.
As documented in the 2010 publication 'A Tax Break for Economic Freedom' by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, divorced women's reliance on nafaqah and deferred mahr from former husbands often fails in practice due to enforcement difficulties, unaffordable litigation, and conditional family backing. Disabled women have job quotas but no fiscal relief comparable to widows.
Thirty years of unchanged reality
The cloth answer has not changed in three decades of field research across South Asia. Technology and social media have opened discussions about periods and autonomy, but the structure beneath remains untouched. The 88% of women using cloth without clean water, soap, or private sanitation are invisible to this budget.
Targeted income and property tax relief for divorced mothers, disabled women, and never-married women above forty was proposed in 2010 but met with institutional silence. Sixteen years later, that bias persists inside government fiscal policy and civil society priorities.
