Arunachalam Muruganantham

For one week, a man in Tamil Nadu walked around wearing a sanitary pad.

Under his clothes he had tied a football bladder full of goat blood, with a small pipe running into the pad.

He wanted to feel what his wife felt.

His village decided he was possessed.

His wife left him. His mother left him.

If you think you need a degree and funding to fix a national problem, read the story of Dr. Arunachalam Muruganantham.

He was born in 1961 in Coimbatore.

His father died in a road accident when he was small. His mother worked in other people's fields to feed him.

He dropped out of school at 14.

After that he did whatever paid: welding, machine work, selling food to factory workers.

In 1998 he married Shanthi. One day he saw her hiding something behind her back.

It was a pile of dirty rags and old newspaper.

That was what she used during her period.

He asked why she did not buy pads.

She said that if she bought them every month, the family would have to cut the milk budget, and milk mattered more than her comfort.

So he checked the math.

The raw material in a pad cost around ₹10.

The pad sold for about 40 times that.

He made his first pad from cotton and gave it to his wife.

Useless, she said.

He needed people to test the next ones. Nobody agreed.

Not his wife, not his sisters, not a single woman in his village.

He gave some to medical college students.

Then a rumour spread that he was chasing college girls.

Shanthi heard it and went to her parents' house.

Two weeks later she said she was not coming back.

His mother walked out too.

The village wanted to tie him to a tree to drive the spirit out.

Log bole isko bhoot chadh gaya hai.

He left the village instead.

So he tested on himself.

Now the hard truth.

This was not a quick win.

It took him about two years of letters and samples sent abroad just to find out what the pads were really made of.

The answer was cellulose from pine wood pulp. Cellulose = the soft fibre inside wood that soaks up liquid

The machine that turns it into pads was imported and cost about ₹3.5 crore.

So he built his own version for about ₹65,000.

In 2006 he showed it at IIT Madras.

It won a national innovation award.

Then big companies offered to buy him out. He said no.

He sells his machines to village women's groups instead, so they make the pads, sell them nearby, and keep the money a big factory would have taken.

His machines are now in 23 of India's 28 states and in other countries.

Thousands of rural women earn from them.

Time put him on its 100 most influential people list in 2014.

He got the Padma Shri in 2016. In 2018, Akshay Kumar played him in Pad Man.

And Shanthi came back.

He had no degree, no money and no support.

He just refused to accept that his wife deserved rags.

✍🏻 Mantra Joshi

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