He wanted to buy the perfect gift for his wife and so he bought a packet of sanitary napkins. He cycled 13 kilometers to the nearest pharmacy in his village in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India and, not knowing which brand to ask for, just pointed to a random package. The pharmacist was astonished to see a man buying sanitary pads for his wife and said so before looking left and right and hurriedly wrapping it in newspaper, as if it were contraband.
"One day my wife was trying to hide something from me. Her hands were behind her back and I thought she wanted to give me something so I playfully chased her around. I caught a glimpse of a tattered bloodstained cloth," says 54 year old Arunachalam Muruganantham adding that when he asked her why she didn't use sanitary pads she said they were too expensive and that she needed the money for far more important things around the house. That gave him the idea to give her a packet of sanitary pads as a gift.
Back in 1998 for a man to buy sanitary pads, that too in a remote village of India, was not only unheard of but considered improper as well. But Muruganantham wanted to impress his then newly wedded wife Shanthi. However, he was astonished to see that 10 grams of cotton which, at that point of time, cost 10 paisa was sold at a whopping sum of four rupees. He figured he could make pads for much cheaper himself.
He bought a roll of cotton wool, put the store bought sanitary napkin over it to measure for size, cut it to pieces, wrapped it with muslin cloth and presented it to his wife. He expected her to tell him he was her savior but what she said instead was that his gift was rubbish and that she preferred using old rags.
According to a report by AC Nielsen, a market research group, 88% of women in India use rolled up newspapers, dried leaves, and old rags during their periods. Because of such practices, many rural women suffer from reproductive tract infections which increase the risk of these women contracting cervical cancer. The case in rural India is same as in Nepal where girls who attain puberty either miss school for a couple of days a month or simply drop out.
After six years of extensive research, Muruganantham invented a low-cost sanitary pad making machine that could manufacture sanitary pads for less than a third of the cost of commercial pads, bringing about a revolution of sorts. His start-up company, Jayaashree Industries, has installed these machines in 26 of the 29 states of India. Muruganantham, once a workshop helper who lived below the poverty line, is now on a mission to make sure all women in India use sanitary pads instead of rags, leaves, and other unhygienic materials. What started as an attempt to impress his wife has earned him numerous awards and accolades.
This social entrepreneur, who studied till grade eight, has gone on to give lectures at many institutions including IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad and Bangalore, and Harvard. He has also given a TED talk and his story was made into a documentary titled the Menstrual Man. In 2014, TIME magazine placed him in its list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. This year, he has been named the Business Leader of the Year by Confederation of Indian Industry and he is also the recipient of the much coveted Padma Shri given by the Indian Government.
But his journey has been far from easy. After the devastating feedback from his wife that his carefully fashioned pad was useless, he set out to make a better sanitary napkin. The only problem then was he couldn't wait a month for each feedback. So he approached medical college students to try the pads. Though some students agreed to test it, they often shied out from telling him what they thought of it. All they said was 'Yes', 'No', and 'Ok.' But that wasn't enough. There was only one thing to do now: He decided to test it himself.
Muruganantham thus became the first and only man to wear a sanitary pad. He created a 'uterus' for himself by punching a couple of holes in a plastic bladder and filling it with goat blood. He walked, cycled and ran with bladder strapped around his waist, under his clothes. He would press on it to make the blood ooze out to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates. His clothes would often be stained with blood and the smell around him was horrible. The result: Everyone is his village thought he had gone mad, or worse was a sociopath.
Menstruation has always been a hush-hush affair with women considered as untouchables during their 'time of the month'. Women choose not to discuss problems related to it and men, more often than not, ignore it completely regarding it as either 'dirty' or a taboo. And then there was Muruganantham who, at one point of time, started asking women for used sanitary napkins to study what locked the blood in those pads as compared to his cotton ones.
Shamed by his behavior and unable to justify it, his widowed mother and wife left him. His stubbornness to keep at it not only came at a huge personal cost but the villagers became convinced he was possessed by evil spirits and were all set to hang him upside down from a tree in a bid to cure him.
"I left my village to escape my fate but I didn't give up on my research," says Murganantham. He wanted to know what the sanitary pads were made of, so he sent them for laboratory analysis. But these tests were expensive so he donated blood and worked for three to four days straight to be able to fund his research. The reports that came back always said it was cotton but he knew from experience that cotton didn't work.
With the help of a college professor, he wrote to multinational companies asking them what was in the pads. "It was like asking Coke to give me their secret formula. Nobody provided any helpful answers," he says explaining how, in the end, he posed as a textile mill owner in Coimbatore who was thinking of getting into the business and requested for some samples. Sometime later, he received strange hardboards in the mail that he just tossed aside, thinking the companies were playing a cruel joke on him.
"The next morning the dog I was living with after my wife and mother left had scratched the board and there was this cotton like stuff poking out from it," says Muruganantham adding that he finally figured out that the hardboard was the bark of a certain type of pine tree and the substance oozing out of it was cellulose.
After almost two years of research, he finally knew what sanitary pads were made of but then there was a glitch. The machine required to breakdown the pine bark wood pulp into cellulose fibers cost thousands of dollars. Again, he decided to make his own. Another four years later, he succeeded in designing a simple machine that makes low-cost sanitary napkins. He now sells his machine to rural women and never to big corporations that have approached him time and again.
"I want to empower rural women who would otherwise have no access to proper jobs or menstrual hygiene. That is my long-term vision," says Muruganantham who wants to create awareness about menstrual hygiene while creating livelihood and empowering women at the same time. "Though I have been slapped countless times by many women's husbands when I've gone to install my machine, it's motivating to see women finally treating menstruation as a health issue and not a taboo. But first, the men must slap me because I deal with menstruation and it concerns their women," he adds.
In 2005, out of around 900 entries, his machine won the award for the Best Innovation for the Betterment of Society in IIT Madras and Pratibha Patil, the then President of India, gave him the award. It was then that he came out of obscurity and into the limelight. Muruganantham remembers being called to receive the award and not having enough money to cover the bus fare to reach the university. "The bus fare was INR 25," says the man who will soon deliver a lecture at the House of Commons in the UK Parliament. He was recently in Kathmandu for a learning session organized by Entrepreneurs' Organization, Nepal.
"The greatest reward of success was that my family came back, and I could return to my village," he says adding that he comes from a family of handloom weavers and his experimental nature is a trait that runs in the family. But it's not just that which has brought him this far. A wicked sense of humor and unflinching spirit are what keep him going. He believes in identifying a problem and finding a solution. He says he's not afraid of failure or what the future holds in store. After all, he's a man who has worn a sanitary pad. And if you can do that, you can do just about anything.
cillakhatry@gmail.com
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