How is this for a brilliant idea by a husband, in India’s
Tamil Nadu Country, who discovered that his wife was using dirty rags during menstruation? He was so shocked and asked why his wife did
not buy sanitary pads. The answer as,
you can guess, was that they were too expensive.
This inspired Arunachalam Muruganantham to search for an
answer to this problem. He set about
creating a sanitary pad out of cotton and gave it to his wife demanding
feedback. She said he’d have to wait
some time. This is when he discovered
that periods only occurred once a month.
Being impatient and informing his wife that he could not wait a month he
went in search for volunteers.
This is how he discovered that hardly any women in his
neighbourhood used sanitary towels. Less
than one in ten. Shocked to discover the
methods women used to get through the monthly cycle, like using sand, ash,
leaves, and even sawdust, he built on his idea.
Finding volunteers to try out these Sanitary Pads proved
extremely difficult. Family members
refused and what chance had a workshop worker of approaching medical college
girls? Pretty much none!
With amazing tenacity, he managed to convince 20 medical
students to try out his pads. However,
on the day he came to fetch the feedback he had asked the students to give, he found 3 students filling in the
forms for the other seventeen. This
feedback was unacceptable and unreliable.
In true entrepreneurial style he decided to try them out
himself. How? Well, he created a Uterus from a football
bladder by punching a couple of holes in it.
He filled this bag with goat’s blood which he obtained from a former
class mate who was a butcher. Another
friend gave him some additive to avoid the blood from clotting too quickly.
With this bladder strapped to him, he wore the pad and
went about his work, constantly pumping blood to test the absorption rate of
the pad. He soon gained a reputation of
being a pervert as he washed his clothes at a public well. People shunned him believing he had a sexual
disease. Friends crossed the road to
avoid him.
Worse was to come, his wife found all this extremely hard
to live with, especially as it took all Arunachalam’s time and money when they
barely had enough to live on anyway. On
top of this they were being shunned by the villagers and rumours started of
affairs with other women. Eventually,
his wife left him after 18 months of this situation.
Not about to give up, he had another brainwave. He studied the used sanitary pads which he
believed were the answer to his problem.
He went back to the Medical Students supplying them with pads and asked
to collect the used ones. When his
mother came across these used pads, she packed her belongings too and left. Arunchalam agreed to leave the village
because the villagers threatened him with hanging upside down from a tree until
he was healed as they believed he was possessed by evil spirits.
At this point, Arunchalam found himself all alone, his
wife and mother had left and the villagers insisted that he left. Still, he was on a mission and the biggest mystery
to him was to figure out what the sanitary pads were made of. Again, it seemed a mammoth task to ask the multinationals,
how they made their towels as the ones Arunchalam had produced did not
work. With the help of a college
professor, he wrote to the Multinationals and paid the professor back by doing domestic
chores for him. He also was forced into
debt with making telephone calls. When
he got through to the companies, they asked him what business he had. At first he did not know how to answer this
question but with time he became savvy and told them he was a textile mill owner
who was thinking of moving into business and requested samples of sanitary pads
from these companies. Finally, after receiving
these samples, Arunachalam could see what these sanitary pads were made
of.
Now to the next hurdle, the sanitary towels were made
from the bark of a tree. The equipment
to break down this bark to use in the manufacturing of the pads was far too pricey,
so our inventor had no option but to design his own. This took four and a half years and the
process to make the Sanitary Pads takes four steps. First a machine similar to a food processor
breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material which is then packed into
rectangular cakes with another machine.
These cakes are then wrapped in non-woven cloth and disinfected in an
ultraviolet treatment unit. The process
can be learnt in an hour.
Having had to leave school at 14 to earn money because
his father had died in a car accident and Arunchalam’s mother was left with
four children to raise and had to sell everything she owned and go out to work
as a farm labourer for $1 dollar a day which hardly covered their needs, he saw
first- hand how hard it was for women to survive.
So the machines he created were simple to operate by
women He likened this experience to the
Wright Brothers’ first flight.
The Breakthrough came when Arunchalam showed this first model,
which was mostly, made of wood, to the Indian Institute of Technology, IIT,
where Scientists were sceptical. How was
this man going to compete against the giant multinationals? Having by this time gained confidence, he had
no wish to compete against any company but to create a new market. Unknown to him, the IIT entered his machine
for a national innovation award and out of 943 entries it came first. He was given the award by the president of
India, Pratibha Patil – an amazing achievement.
His fame meant that his wife and mother returned and the
villagers welcomed him back. It took 18
months to build 250 machines which Arunchalam took to the poorest villages in
Northern India. He had no intention of
becoming a tycoon but wanted to help poor communities. This meant overcoming another huge hurdle as
initially villagers were sceptical and to employ women, he had to get the
permission of their fathers or husbands.
As the women produced these sanitary pads, they were also
allowed to sell them directly to the customers and are able to inform other
women how to use them. Each woman can
choose a brand name for her pad production so there is no over-arching brand. Each machine converts 3000 women to pad usage
and provides employment for ten.
Arunchalam’s aim is to create jobs for women in poor
countries. He lives a modest life with
his family and has no wish to accumulate riches. His motto is:
by the women, for the women and to the women. He is happy to accumulate a lot of happiness’. One rags to riches story but not in the
ordinary sense.
Source: Published under the heading : ‘The man who brought sanitary pads – and liberation
– to rural India’, in The Week, 15 March 2014.
A longer version of this article first appeared in the BBC News
Magazine, at www.bbc.co.uk/magazine
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