Meet Padman Arunachalam Muruganantham who made India’s first low-cost sanitary pad making machine
Padman Arunachalam Muruganantham shared snippets of his journey - from being called names and ridiculed by his village for relentlessly pursuing the need for low-cost sanitary napkins to becoming a successful social entrepreneur in India at HerStory’s Women on a Mission Summit 2022.
With menstruation a taboo subject in India and sanitary napkins being sold in black poly bags as if it were a shameful item - over two decades ago, one man took it upon himself to make a low-cost alternative for his wife.
Founder of Jayshree Industries, Arunachalam Muruganantham grew up in a poverty-stricken family in Coimbatore raised by his mother, a farm labourer. His father had died in a road accident when Arunachalam was young. These circumstances forced him to drop out of school when he was 14.
When he got married, he saw his wife collecting old newspapers, rags, etc. to use during her menstrual cycle. When he realised that her wife had to use an unhygienic piece of cloth for her menstrual flow, he was struck with a deep realisation of what women in his village had to go through every month during menstruation.
“Buying a sanitary napkin wasn’t an option as it was too expensive for women in villages. We couldn’t afford it but one day I decided to cycle 14 km to the city to buy a pack of sanitary napkins for my wife. The shopkeeper wrapped the packet in a newspaper and then a polybag. I was shocked because it felt like I was smuggling something,” Arunachalam recalled, in an address at HerStory’s Women on a Mission Summit 2022.
He wanted to see what a pad looked like so he opened the pack and had a close look. “I found that the amount of cotton inside the pad wouldn’t even cost a rupee then why should I pay Rs 10 for one pad?” he asked.
Filled with curiosity and drive, Arunachalam decided to make a pad at a lower cost for his wife. He spent years researching the raw material, the technology that would help him make low-cost pads among other things. When he went from village to village in his quest of understanding the taboo around menstruation and what women in other villages used during their periods, he found that beyond rags and newspapers, women also used sawdust, dried tree leaves and ash.
“I used to read about people talking about sending women to the moon but I thought to myself, first provide each and every woman in India with a sanitary pad and then think about sending them to the moon. Men know nothing about menstruation and even the menstrual cycle of women in their own houses. We can lead corporations but we have no idea about what is happening with our partner’s body,” Arunachalam said, shedding light on the lack of education around menstruation among men.
Arunachalam’s research required him to put his sanitary napkins on trial but his wife was fed up with his maddening pursuit so she left him to go back to her parents. He couldn’t ask any other woman in the village to try it out in fear of being ostracised. So, he decided to make a fake bladder using animal blood, tied it around his waist to test the flow and put his sanitary napkins on trial. His weird acts garnered a lot of ridicule from village folk.
To understand the difference between the pads he was trying to make and how a readymade pad works, he convinced the girls studying in the village medical college to give their used sanitary napkins to him by throwing them in a dustbin that he could collect from.
“When my mother saw me with used sanitary napkins laid out on the table, she started to yell and cry in horror. The whole village gathered and spread the rumour that I drank girls’ blood,” Arunachalam recalled the horrors he went through two decades ago while trying to invent a low-cost sanitary napkin.
He added, “I ran away at midnight to a nearby city to complete my research. I lost my family and more but I cracked the code of high liquid-retention cotton derived from pinewood that is used to make sanitary napkins by big companies.”
It took Arunachalam 9.5 years and several trials to innovate a simplified cost-effective sanitary pad-making machine.
“Making anything complicated is easy but giving a simple solution to an issue is the toughest and most time-consuming process. Giant corporations have millions of dollars to make big machines to manufacture sanitary napkins but I didn’t have money and so I wanted to create a machine that people in villages could use to manufacture their own sanitary pads,” he noted.
Arunachalam has received numerous awards and honours and his work has been recognised in some of the world’s most renowned publications like TIME magazine, Forbes etc. He is also the subject of award-winning documentaries like Menstrual Man by Amit Virmani and is counted amongst the most successful social entrepreneurs in India. Beyond all this, Arunachalam became a household name in India when a Bollywood movie, Padman, starring Akshay Kumar directed by R Balki was released in 2018.
A shout out to the sponsors of Women on Mission Summit 2022, an Initiative by HerStory, by YourStory -BYJU'S, the presenting partner, and other sponsors - Kyndryl, Sequoia Spark, Zilingo, Atlassian, Akamai, Freshworks for Startups, and Netapp Excellerator.
Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan