A Man in women's world

         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.

1. In the first stage, it chops up wood using a powerful motor. 
2. Then the operator compresses the pulp manually into a towel shape by controlling a core-forming unit with a foot pedal. 
3. They wrap each towel with a non-woven fabric and seal them with another pedal unit. 
4. 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".

Link : Jayashree Industries