Meet the man who wore a sanitary pad to help the women of India.

By ELSPETH VELTEN

The dreaded moment had come – my first period during my three months in India was due and I was out of tampons.

If the search for modern menstrual products had been hard in Malaysia, I knew in India it would be much worse. I heaved a sigh of relief when I found a pharmacy in touristy Varanasi that had a few dusty boxes of OBs, but couldn’t help but notice the curious look on other male customers faces when the shopkeeper handed me the boxes.

It was clear these men had no idea what I was purchasing – a woman’s cycle isn’t exactly dinner table conversation for India’s conservative society – and I realised that the reality of being a menstruating woman in India was way more intense than I could even imagine.

The reality is that most women in India don’t have access to even the most rudimentary disposable sanitary products and that time of the month can be crippling for a woman trying to take care of a family or for a girl trying to make it through high school. In a 2011 survey commissioned by the India’s government, AC Neilsen found that the number of women using pads in the country is just 12%, and that the remaining 88% of women use materials like germ-ridden cloths, ashes and sand.

When Indian man Arunachalam Muruganantham learned about the less-than-hygienic situation from his new wife who was trying to hide the soiled rags she recycled every month, he was shocked. Arunachalam was immediately determined to impress his wife by improving how she managed her period.

“I don’t even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler,” Muruganantham said of his wife’s unhygienic solution. “Why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife?”

Muruganantham didn’t let his lack of education or knowledge of the situation get in his way. From his home in rural Southern India, Muruganantham, a school dropout early in life, immediately began researching the materials used for sanitary pads. He looked for a way to make the napkins cheaper, so that women didn’t have to choose between being able to afford milk for their families and menstrual pads. He bought cotton, formed a prototype for his wife to test and looked for immediate feedback, revealing just how little he knew about a woman’s monthly cycle.

It was then that he realised he’d need more volunteers in order to conduct his research in a timely manner. His sisters refused to discuss the taboo topic with him so he turned to a local medical college and was able to convince a group of female students test his product and provide feedback. When it came time to collect data, Muruganantham found out that the girls were also too embarrassed to answer his questions honestly. He was forced to take testing into his own hands.

Using tubes, a football bladder and goat blood, Muruganantham synthesized a woman’s period by pumping blood into a pad he wore while he walked and biked around town. “Like the first man to set foot on the moon, [I’m] the first man [who] wore a sanitary pad,” Muruganantham said in a 2012 TED Talk.

His seemingly obsessive experiments, which also included examining a collection of used pads that he obtained from the medical students, led his wife and his mother to leave him, and the rest of his village to ostracize him.

With nothing left to lose, Muruganantham continued to develop his idea. His experiments with cotton weren’t working, so he enlisted the help of a college professor, whom he paid back with hours of physical labour, and wrote to big companies to ask about materials. He learned that mass-produced pads are made of cellulose from tree bark, not from cotton, and began work on a machine that could be used to easily break down and form cellulose into useable cakes – a machine much smaller and much less expensive that those used by big companies.

Four years later, Muruganantham’s result was a simple machine that’s now used across rural India. Muruganantham travels across the country to remote villages to help install the machines and train the new business owners and employees who will use them – all women, of course. Most machines are purchased by NGOs or women’s self help groups and each business can employ up to 10 women. The three-step process is simple to learn and the manual functions of the machine mean that breakdowns are easy for workers to troubleshoot.

Women are empowered in more ways than one by Muruganantham’s innovation; not only do women all over rural India have access to affordable sanitary napkins that will decrease their risk of menstrual disease and increase the amount of girls who stay in school, women also get to run their own businesses where they can set their own sale prices (in some cases, pads are even bartered for vegetables), create a brand for their own products and make money independently from their husbands. At the time of filming of the documentary about Muruganantham, Menstrual Man, there were over 600 machines distributed across 23 states in India and in 2009, Muruganantham received a National Innovation Foundation award from the president of India.

When his business model began to see success, Muruganantham aimed to create jobs for more than one million women across India and for India to be “100 percent sanitary napkin-using country” in his lifetime. But that was before his machine began to get international attention. His goal of creating jobs for one million Indian women has changed to creating jobs for 10 million women worldwide as he installs his model and machine in other developing nations.

But Muruganantham runs his business differently than other business owners might. Instead of putting a patent on his product and making the money that he might, Muruganantham earns just what he needs to live and doesn’t focus on turning a profit. “If anyone runs after money, their life will not [have] any beauty,” Muruganantham told a TED audience in Bangalore. “It is boredom.”

Of course, as Muruganantham’s success mounted, his wife, mother and village all came back to him. His strange research methods were not signs that he was an adulterer or possessed by evil spirits, as his friends and family members suspected. His wife is now involved in advocating for the use of pads in their village, and his daughter “will never use a rag to manage her sanitary days,” he says. “I am becoming a solution provider. I’m very happy. I don’t want to make this as a corporate entity. I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe.”

Amit Virmani’s 2013 documentary, Menstrual Man, is available for viewing at MenstrualMan.com