MY STANDING OVATION TO THE 'MENSTRUAL' MAN

(Here comes an Indian man who wore sanitary pads himself to understand the menstrual cycle, its needs and came up with a low cost sanitary pad for Indian women across rural India)


Well, he had seen his wife Shanthi hiding something behind and leave the bedroom one day. He was curious

as to what she was hiding and then realised it was a piece of dirty cloth that she would have to ‘wear’ to take care of her periods. More than 80 per cent of women in India still don’t know the use of sanitary pads during  menstruation or the pads are too expensive to be bought. Hence majority of the women both in rural and urban areas still rely on the cloth that they get around. This practice is indeed utterly unhygenic. But it was not a woman who thought of doing something to stop this practice. On the contrary it was a man who realised a woman’s sufferings and decided to come up with a low cost sanitary pad that every woman across India could make use of.
Arunachalam Muruganantham, who worked at a workshop and came from an economically backward class was someone who was ready to research, experiment and innovate for a woman’s cause.

He realised most sanitary pads in India are made by multinational companies and hence the cotton used in the pads as a soaking material though costs less than 10 paise, each pad is sold for not less than Rs6-8. That shows what a huge profit the companies were making and how the Indian women at large suffered because they couldn’t afford the pads.

But it was pretty surprising that in his entire effort Muruganantham didn’t get the support of any woman. Take the case of his wife and mother. The wife separated and asked for divorce, while the mother thought his son has gone insane when she saw one day he was experimenting with various sanitary pads on his table and trying to find out exactly what material they were made of. Even the medical college girl students whom he took as case studies, either filled in the feedback forms writing wrong things or were frightened to speak to him thinking he was a pervert.

Still, Muruganantham was undaunted. While he tried to make his wife and later his sisters the test cases for his sanitary pad trial run, they deserted him thinking he has gone insane. So he had no other alternative but to wear a pad himself regularly and using liquids as viscous as blood to realise how much absorbent his pads are. Thus started the trail run. A man wearing sanitary pads to support women hygiene.

He understood that though the raw material was cheap, the machines where the sanitary pads were made ran into crores. That was the biggest investment which could not be done on a small scale. So he thought of designing his own machine. And he did it. He sent his model to IIT and his innovation got the first prize in a competition.

Now its a successfully running self-sustaining sanitary napkin business, called Jayashree Industries. It has 2003 units across India, including the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, employing 21,000 women, from rural areas making them self supporting too. For his innovation and efforts, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2014.

So for a man who was just a meagre worker at a workshop, it was a daunting task to make the cheapest sanitary pads and reach it out to lakhs of women in India who were so long forced to give up their hygiene at the cost of ‘Mesntruation’ a biological phenomenon that is still considered a taboo.