While surfing channels on the television after a leisurely lunch, A Muruganantham noticed his wife trying to hide a piece of rag and disappear into the washroom.
After much questioning, to his horror, Muruganantham realised that she used that rag, dirtier than the cloths used in garages, every month for her menstrual cycle.
She said she had no option but to rely on such rags as sanitary napkins available in the market were priced exorbitantly, and buying them would mean cutting the family’s monthly milk budget.
That was the first time Muruganantham realised the extent of risk not just his wife, but all those women who couldn’t afford sanitary napkins were facing. He was determined to make an effort to change the way things were.
After buying a branded napkin packet, he noticed that in each pad, about 10 gm of cotton which costs about 10-20 paise was used, but the napkins were sold for ¤4 each.
“Spending ¤4 on one napkin is unimaginable for most women who live a hand-to-mouth existence,” he says.
A study by Nielsen and Plan India, a group which works with children, states that out of India’s over 355 million menstruating women, only 12% use sanitary napkins.
“A large segment cannot use it due to issues like affordability and accessibility as well as lack of water and toilets. Hence they end up using rags, etc and catch infections in the reproductive and urinary tracts,” says Dr Mira Shiva, co-ordinator, Initiative for Health Equity and Society.
That’s when Muruganantham thought about working out a strategy which will help provide low-cost napkins to women.
His next step was to visit a mill in his town Coimbatore and buy a cotton roll, cut it in rectangles, the size of a sanitary pad, wrap the rectangles in viscose and create a pad. But he needed volunteers for testing the effectiveness of the pad. Despite much coaxing, his wife and two sisters refused to volunteer in the project and thus he was left with no choice but to approach some medical college students.
The response he got from the 22 students was not encouraging, as they felt the pads to be ineffective.
Without losing focus, Muruganantham, who was then working in a shop that manufactured windows and doors, decided to decode the branded napkins.
“Since I was so determined to create sanitary pads, people around me thought either I was a pervert or had lost my mental balance. But I took all this as a challenge,” he says, explaining that his next step entailed collecting used napkins and studying how they functioned.
This meant requesting those medical college students to leave their used branded napkins in a black bag near the campus and collecting them. He finally realised that while he used cotton to make his first bunch of pads, the branded napkins were made of cellulose. Cotton absorbs the fluid, but cannot retain it, while cellulose can absorb as well as retain.
“That was why I was not getting results.” All this happened 12 years ago. After getting an initial funding of Rs800,000 from the National Innovation Foundation in Gujarat, Muruganantham, who dropped out of school after class 10 due to his family’s weak financial position, set out to design machines which can process wood fibre to get cellulose and make napkins.
Today, Muruganantham’s Jayaashree Industries manufactures these machines for about Rs65,000 and sells them to groups of poor women for about Rs75,000.
“I felt why not sell these machines to women and teach them to make napkins, so that they can sell them and earn some income. That way not only will clean napkins be provided to women at low cost, but in the process employment can be generated,” says Muruganantham, whose machines were purchased by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and supplied to African countries.
Since 2006 Jayaashree has sold about 500 machines in 21 states in India, which has, in turn, helped create employment for 5,000 women. The venture has succeeded in shifting 1 million women from rags to sanitary napkins.
“It costs us ¤9 to make 5 napkins and they are sold for Rs10 or 12,” says Pascal Saldanha, who monitors a group of nine women who work full-time to produce napkins in Puttana Kanagalu, a remote place near Mysore. Saldanha says the women, most of whom are schooled only up to class seven or nine, make Rs50 per day.
For Kumari Padmalata, the napkin making job is a blessing as the Rs2,000-2,500 she earns monthly goes into feeding her family some decent meals. The girl from Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, who has studied up to class 12, would otherwise have found it near impossible to get a secure job in a women friendly environment.
“The raw material comes from Jayaashree. Monthly production worth Rs50,000 is undertaken at our unit which runs on a no-profit no-loss basis,” says V Simhachalam, manager at Zilla Mahila Samakhya in Srikakulum, which started this activity in June 2009.
Muruganantham says his aim is to create awareness about hygiene and provide employment to as many women as possible.
Aparajita Agrawal, vice-president (knowledge and insight) at social sector advisory firm Intellecap, says as far as investor interest goes, enterprises like Jayaashree, which is quite an untouched model and needs adequate community support, do attract attention from social investors. However, investors have expectations and look for returns.
“Investors will also tell me to increase the price of the machine so that more profits can be made,” says Muruganantham. “We work on a need-based model and the intention is not profit making.”
Comments