Column | Sunil Jaglan: ideas for an equal world

Sunil Jaglan, 43, is evidence that the birth of a daughter can inspire a man to smash the patriarchy. His childhood home followed that classic Indian rule: housework is the woman’s job.

“My father was a teacher but even on his holidays, he would be reading the newspaper as my mother served him,” he says. “My habits were the same.” Jaglan was waited hand on foot by his three younger sisters. “We all studied but they also had to do housework and my work,” he adds. “Wash my clothes, give me chai or I would say, ‘I want to eat namkeen chawal [savoury rice]’.”

Now, he is a gender advocate with whom women share their most intimate problems. Jaglan is their window to a more equitable world and they discuss everything, from domestic violence and late periods to vaginal health and hormonal imbalance.

It helps that he has great ideas, like his viral 2015 ‘Selfie With Daughter’ campaign that urged proud fathers to take photographs with their daughters to fight female foeticide. He received 8 lakh images from around the world. That’s only one of a 100 or so campaigns around gender equity that Jaglan has conjured up after his first daughter, Nandini, was born in 2012.

When he distributed sweets to celebrate her birth, he got sympathy and condolences. That was his Eureka moment. By then, the mathematics postgraduate was two years into his five-year stint as sarpanch (village leader) of the Bibipur Gram Panchayat in Haryana. That year, he organised a khap mahapanchayat in which women participated. They invited hundreds of khap leaders to support them in a campaign against female foeticide. The State’s sex ratio has climbed to 923 in 2025, from 850 in 2012.

The patriarchal virus

Many of Jaglan’s early ideas focused on foeticide but later they expanded to include issues such as ‘Womaniya GDP’, a campaign to compensate women for household chores or ‘Gaali Bandh Ghar’, an effort to prevent sexist abuses, and ‘Women’s Happiness Chart’ that logged the number of hours in a day that women felt happy. “They are so happy when there is a programme in the village, but they don’t feel that same joy at home,” he says.

Jaglan was trolled for his 2019 ‘Period Chart’ campaign where he advocated pinning a chart that tracked a household’s period cycles. Even before this, he had uploaded an image of himself holding a sanitary pad on social media. The Internet was aghast that a man was discussing such ‘private’ issues, but Jaglan couldn’t care less. “In 2011, I bought a sanitary pad-making machine for the village but I couldn’t talk about it,” he says. “Now I can talk about this and more for 4-5 hours with anyone without hesitation.”

After his sarpanch days, he turned consultant and continued his equal rights advocacy. He has been a professor of practice at two private universities in the region and, in 2017, he founded the non-profit Selfie With Daughter Foundation that has introduced his gender justice campaigns in 630 villages. He calls them ‘Ehsaas (realisation) ka Software’, to “kill the patriarchal virus”.

Nandini, now 14, is an activist who petitions her principal about why teachers shouldn’t segregate girls when talking about periods or how the ‘no skirts, two braids’ rule for Class IX students is illogical. Yashika, his younger daughter, wants people to celebrate ‘Behen Dooj’ alongside the traditional ‘Bhai Dooj’ that celebrates a sister’s love and prayers for her brother’s long life.

Breaking menopause silence

When Jaglan began discussing rajonivritti (menopause) with men in 2024, he found that 99% did not know about this key phase in the life of women. “Some didn’t even know that periods stop,” he says.

Jaglan says their first reaction was laughter, as they registered the freedom from birth control. But not one man had any idea what women go through or how to improve their quality of life.

“Men control the economics of the household and they don’t allocate money for menopause consultations,” he adds. That’s when he began explaining to men how they could help the older women in their lives. In fact, many of his ideas in recent years target men.

When Jaglan launched a campaign to goad men to do more household work, he was logging 8-9 minutes of housework a day. “Now I’m at one hour plus,” he says, listing all the things he does, such as cleaning the house/ toilets, making beds, doing laundry, folding clothes, shopping, getting his own water, tracking his children’s health checkups and locking down the house.

He even has a modest repertoire of dishes he can cook, including dal, khichdi and dalia. His wife spends an hour and a half on housework against her previous three hours. “Gender equality can’t be taught,” says Jaglan. “It has to be lived.”

The writer is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.

Published – March 12, 2026 03:45 pm IST