Arunachalam Muruganantham

While I grew up with two younger sisters, I never looked into the problem of menstruation till I got married. We had a small thatched toilet at the back of our house. It had neither a roof nor a door. While growing up I used to see a stained cloth used by my sisters but I never paid too much attention to it. I used to run away seeing it, never asked questions or discussed the same with anyone. In fact, I thought the bleeding was probably because my sisters got hurt while collecting firewood in the forest. By the age of 24, I owned a small shop and used to make windows and gates. In 1998 I got married to a beautiful girl named Shanthi. It was an arranged marriage and the most important thing for me was to impress my bride. Since we lived in a joint family I never got one-on-one time with her. To impress my new wife, I used to buy her a 5 Rupees plastic pendant or glass bangles. One day during lunchtime, she was trying to hide something from me. I asked her what she was hiding? She said none of your business and ran away. I followed her and saw her carrying a dirty ragged cloth. It had blood on it. It reminded me of the cloth my sisters used. Innocently I asked her if she had hurt herself. She replied it’s that time of the month and every woman goes through it monthly.

Even today, one of the only places to buy sanitary napkins in India is a medical store. To impress my new wife, I remember I rode my bicycle 13 kilometers one way, to the nearest store to buy a packet of sanitary pads. The shopkeeper asked me what brand I wanted. I didn’t have a clue. Finally, he took the packet of pads wrapped it in lots of newspaper and slyly handed it to me like he was smuggling drugs to me. I found his behavior odd and it made me more curious. That curiosity allowed me to go home and open the packet and explore the sanitary napkin with my hands. I touched it, felt it and tried to understand what it’s made of. How many men do that? None! The awareness level about sanitary pads amongst men is less than 1% in India. It took me 7.5 years to come up with my own affordable sanitary pad. I started designing an experimental pad and gave it to my wife for testing. I had to wait for her monthly cycle to get feedback and when she finally tested it, she said it was the worst napkin that she had ever used and that she was better off with a cloth. I decided to use my sisters as test subjects so that I wouldn’t have to wait endlessly for my wife’s cycles. Eventually, they too stopped co-operating. I looked for female volunteers who could test my pads, but most were too shy to discuss their menstrual issues with me or provide concrete feedback. My wife couldn’t bear my obsession for pads and she misunderstood my interaction with other women and girls and left my home.

I distributed my pads to girls in a local medical college, provided they returned them to me after use. When my mother saw me storing a bunch of used sanitary napkins in our house, she was convinced that her son was under a black magic spell. It was very difficult to get women to try my product and so I decided to test the pads on myself. I used to wear the pads and using a football bladder with animal blood test their effectiveness. When my fellow village men saw me washing my blood-stained undergarments, they concluded I’m suffering from a sexual disease. I became a subject of ridicule in my village. As menstruation is a taboo subject in India, I was ostracized by my family and the villagers. One night I fled the village. Menstruation is a social taboo. Raising awareness is key to engaging men. Initially retailing was the way to go, then e-tailing became popular. My model is Detailing. You need to spend time, spread awareness and make the topic of menstruation viral. We have created 890 brands of sanitary napkins in rural India! It’s a sustainable livelihood. We are creating a livelihood for women and helping girls get an education and go to school. I want girls to go to school and solve a social problem.

Arunachalam Muruganantham is a social entrepreneur from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India. He is the inventor of a low-cost sanitary pad-making machine and is credited for innovating grassroots mechanisms for generating awareness about traditional unhygienic practices around menstruation in rural India. His mini-machines, which can manufacture sanitary pads for less than a third of the cost of commercial pads, have been installed in 23 of the 29 states of India. He is currently planning to expand the production of these machines to 106 nations. The movie Period. End of Sentence. won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary (Short Subject) for the year 2018. In 2014, he was included in Time magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2016, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.

Sources sayfty.com