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Students design sanitary napkin vending machine

We are elated at the platform that the university has offered us. They supported our initiative even after we passed out: Akanksha Sangle

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Akanksha Sangle and her team installed the machine on the college campus in September last year
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The next time Aunty Flo decides to pay a sudden visit to one of the girls at Sandip University, she need not have to rush out to buy sanitary napkins. Thanks to Kajal Patil, Akanksha Sangle and Pratiksha Patil, seven sanitary napkin vending machines that they designed and built have been installed on campus.

When the three girls learnt that the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE), Maharashtra, had released a circular making sanitary napkin vending machines mandatory in all colleges across the state, they decided to create a vending machine for their annual project. They also wanted to ensure that women do not face any problems in terms of hygiene and convenience during their menstrual cycle; the machines were installed on campus in September 2016.

“When we consulted with our head at the department of electronics and telecommunication, we were told about this circular. This gave us the thought of taking it up as our annual project. We received tremendous motivation from our teacher. In our fourth year, we successfully brought out our product after a year of research in April 2016,” says 22-year-old Akanksha Sangle from Nashik.

The girls first did a survey to understand how a vending machine works, what size and weight coins can be used, how many and so on. “We went to schools, colleges, bus stands and railways stations to understand how vending machines work,” says Mumbai-based Pratiksha Patil. They also watched demonstrations and then changed some of the existing technology to suit their model.

With a capacity to hold 40 sanitary napkins, the vending machine has an “LED display for instructions on how to use the machine,” says Kajal Patil (23). The sanitary napkins are available for Rs10 each. “The machin runs on electricity and on batteries for upto 10 hours,” she adds. “There’s a glass slide, through which one can keep tabs on the napkins stock apart from a ‘no stock’ indicator,” adds Patil. For any maintenance issues, the girls, who have now passed out of college, will have to be called.

The girls received funds from the university chairman Dr Sandip Jha after the trio gave him a demonstration of the machine, each of which costs Rs20,000-22,000 to manufacture. The only difficulty “we had was in programming; there’s an embedded programming software, which we had to learn. Our teachers helped us with that,” says 22-year-old Patil, who currently works at Wipro. “We are elated at the platform that the university has offered us. They supported our initiative even after we passed out,” shares Sangle.

ABOUT THE SANDIP UNIVERSITY

Situated in Nashik, Sandip University is an autonomous educational university guided and governed by the policy, rules and regulations of Maharashtra state and under the regulations of the University Grants Commission. Sandip University belongs to Sandip Group of Institutions, which owns the Sandip Foundation in Nashik. The university has several graduate and post-graduate programmes, including Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Science, Commerce, Arts, Law, Business Administration, and Computer Application. It also offers Bachelor’s in Technology.

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