Grassroots ingenuity

Have you ever seen a man who loved his wife so much that to find a solution to her monthly problem, he actually wore panties and simulated an experiment involving animal blood to understand how she felt during her period? Sounds fairy-tale like but meet Mr. Arunachalam Muruganantham, a South Indian man, who has accomplished not just this but so much more. Dubbed as the “first man to wear a sanitary towel” by the BBC and “Tampon King” by the Independent, he is no pervert but a dedicated and self-motivated individual who created a social enterprise from nothing but scratch and has revolutionized the period industry for good.

Mr. Muruganantham inspirational story started in 1998. He belonged to a BPL ( Below poverty line) household where his mother worked as a hand loom operator and he himself, a high school dropout, worked as a workshop helper. One day he saw his wife going to the bathroom with an extremely dirty rag. Upon asking what it was, she told him that she was going to use it for her time of the month. He was shocked to see the unhygienic cloth being used for this purpose. But more so, he was shocked to hear that his wife was forced to use this horrible fabric, just because she could not buy milk for the family, if she spent money on expensive sanitary pads.

 This event would mark the beginning of his decade long tiresome, long and searing journey to find the cheapest sanitary materials that could give his wife a safe and clean menstrual time.

In India, only 2 percent of women can afford to use sanitary pads during their periods.   The rest of 98 percent (millions of women) use rags, ash, mud and some even sit on hay for days until the periods pass. Some even die due to infections caused by using moldy clothes in which insect live and thrive. Due to these reasons, many school going girls end up dropping out because they just cannot cope with the pressures of managing a period. This creates a never ending cycle of poverty and misery.

 On top of that there are extreme superstitions and taboos attached with the menstrual talk. As a convention, a man just cannot talk about it, let alone know about it in detail. Women guard their period like a closely guarded secret. Talking about periods to a girl and between themselves is actually a sexual fetish for many young South Asian men, due to the cultural secrecy surrounding the menstrual cycle in those countries. So you can imagine, what kind of problems Muruganantham had to face when he set out in his quest to find a cheap alternative to expensive pads for his wife. He outlines his journey in the following talk.( I highly recommend listening to this)

He realized that the multinational corporations were selling a 10 Paisa  (0.001892 Canadian cents) raw material for 4 Rupees (0.08 CAD). There, his quest started for the best raw material to use in his sanitary napkins. After many trials he finally found the material known for excellent absorbency. Yes, it was wood pulp.   He sat down to make a low cost effective machine that would convert wood pulp to sanitary napkins.After 6 years of relentless determination, hardwork and dedication he finally made a machine that would make, not only  sanitary napkins but will provide employment for millions of women in rural India.

 Instead of creating a corporate structure, he opted for Self Help Groups where rural women are taught how to make the pads, who then sell it to women like themselves at a very low cost (less than third the cost of traditional napkins).  His aim is to make India a 100 percent napkin using country. Currently, 627 of his machines are in production in 23 states of  India and 6 other countries, which creates employment while creating tremendous amounts of  sustainable social change.  The reason why he is doing that is following in his own words:

“From the childhood I know, no human being die because of poverty. Everything happens because of ignorance. So, ignorance means what you know? Just chasing this money.”