Muruganantham, a Man in women's world. Here is the story behind the invention of worlds low-cost sanitary napkin manufacturing machine.In 1998, Arunachalam Muruganantham was a
workshop helper who lived below the poverty line in Coimbatore, Tamil
Nadu. The first step to the invention of sanitary towels began when he caught his wife,
Shanti, trying to slip away with some filthy clothes. When he enquired her, she
said "Nothing, its womens problem", after continuous questions she told its cloth used during her periods. He suggested why cant you use sanitary napkin, she told "the choice was between buying sanitary towels for herself or buying milk
for the family".
This is not just his wife, but 88% of women in India
resort to using ashes, newspapers, dried leaves and even husk sand
during their periods, according to a report by market research group AC
Nielsen called Sanitary Protection: Every Woman's Health Right. As a
result of these unhygienic practices, more than 70% of the women suffer
from reproductive tract infections, increasing the risk of contracting
associated cervical and other cancers.
Faced with a challenge, Muruganantham decided
to create a low-cost sanitary towel for his wife. His entrepreneurial spirit
emerged quite early when his handloom weaving father died.Muruganantham drop out of high school at the age of 14.
Cooking
and delivering breakfast to factory workers pressed for time was his
first successful venture, but he had to abandon it when he received
threats from a competitor who copied his idea. At 15, he joined a
workshop where he worked on gates and windows.With his creativity in imparting the rangoli patterns on the metal gates, he become so popular and started his own workshop.He have be selling fireworks, sugarcane, Ganesha statues and other crafsmenship, crafting a sanitary towel didn't seem
like a big deal.
Soon he started researching on the materials used in the sanitary towel, he found cotton is the material used.He started out by purchasing the best quality
cotton he could find and made a few samples. He wanted the samples to be tested by his wife and sister for immediate test results.Initially his wife was reluctant and later started to support, but that was not for long time.
He says "His wife left him a year and half after he started his research", because he was giving the sanitary towels and was expecting the feedback for that.Failing the attempts made with his wife and sister, he started to request help from medical college students and again getting a failure result because they too were not ready to discuss in depth.
Atlast himself being the testing material. He went on collecting blood
from a butcher shop and treating it chemically to prevent coagulation,
he wore a bladder-and-tube contraption and women's underwear for a
week. His homemade uterus would release a small dose of blood whenever
pressed.
He tried different approaches because of the unsastisfactory results.He distributed the towels free and asked women to return the
used ones. "It wasn't easy," says Muruganantham. "They thought I would
use it for black magic." Her mother also left her after seeing his son with a room full of used sanitary towels".
Hardwork never fails,after two long years,he figured out that towels were made of pine wood cellulose
derived from the bark of the tree. He approached American
manufacturers via email with the help of local teachers. The
manufacturers sent him board-like sheets that he puzzled over for 10
days until he tore them in half to reveal compressed fibres.
Muruganantham found required a
machine costing more than £300,000, which reclaims
the fibres into usable cellulose. "I decided to make a simple version
of this machine, to re-engineer it," he says. It took him more than
four years of trial and error to fabricate one in his workshop. In 2006, his machine won the award for the best innovation
for the betterment of society from the IIT, Madras.
It isn't easy that you meet a
man who endured public ridicule for years, or received a presidential
award for innovation. Softly spoken and unassuming, this 46-year-old
inventor leaves you howling with laughter as he narrates his tales. The
ability to mock himself is one of his chief charms. "Women fled at the
sight of me; people used to call me mental and wondered if I had weird
diseases," he recalls. "I was even suspected of being possessed by a
bad spirit. No one used to come near me during full moons because of
that. I had to meet what friends I had in secret."
Muruganantham refuses to sell his innovation to the corporate world. "I
didn't take the money route because I saw my parents struggle for
survival," he explains. "I knew that this machine could provide a
sustainable livelihood for many rural women."His company sells
the 65,000 machines directly to rural women with the help of bank
loans, NGOs and women's SHG. An
operator can learn the entire towel-making process in three hours and
then employ three others to help with processing and distribution.
A basic machine produces 1,000 sanitary towels a day; the pneumatic
version churns out 3,000. Women pack around six to eight towels in a
packet and sell them for as little as 13 rupees (16p).
Process Involved:
The towel-making machine
transforms cellulose into sterilised towels in a four-part process.
- In the first stage, it chops up wood using a powerful motor.
- Then the operator compresses the pulp manually into a towel shape by controlling a core-forming unit with a foot pedal.
- They wrap each towel with a non-woven fabric and seal them with another pedal unit.
- Finally, they sterilize the towels by exposing them to ultraviolet light, trimming the end product and affixing strips before packing.
The entire
system operates on a woman-to-woman basis. Women making the towels
spread awareness of the product locally, eventually helping others make
the shift to this more hygienic method of control. Setting up
100,000 units, he says, will generate employment for one million women.
"No one is bothered about uneducated and illiterate people. Through
this model, they can live with dignity". It is hard to create a
revolution when the entire topic is largely taboo. "Women cannot ask
family members to buy it for them, because they have shyness as a
problem," says Nilendu Chatterjee, manager of the corporate social
responsibility division of Jindal Steel & Power in Orissa. The
company has installed four machines that employ 32 women
through its Shodashi (sweet 16) programme.
Seven months after
visiting a tribal village in Uttarakhand, he received a call from a
mother who told him that her little girl was going to school. It was
the first time a woman had made enough money to give her daughter an
education in the history of that community. This, Muruganantham says, "his greatest compliment".