Pune school dropout turns innovator

A Muruganantham caught his wife hiding a cloth in her bag once, much dirtier than the one he used at his welding workshop.

Although his wife was reluctant to respond to his query, Muruganantham found out that his wife used that dirty cloth as a sanitary napkin during her menstrual cycle.

Initially aghast at its unhygienic usage and the grave health risk it posed, Muruganantham soon realised that buying sanitary napkins would cost his family a day’s meal. He is a standard X pass out and his father is a handloom weaver while his mother works as a farm labourer.

According to statistics, in rural areas 97% women resort to re-using cloth as a sanitary napkin as they can’t afford those available in the market. Eager to help these women, Muruganantham set out to find a way that would make sanitary napkins available at low cost.

And after four years of extensive research, he came up with a machine which does just that. His creation churns out sanitary napkins which are comparable to the premium-priced sanitary
napkins available in the
market in terms of
absorbency and hygiene.

Muruganantham’s machine is priced at Rs75,000, a fraction of Rs3.5 crore that the big names in the industry spend on their plants.

His creation can produce a whopping 120 sanitary napkins an hour, with each napkin costing a nominal Re1.

As a result, most women can now afford these napkins and do not have to use cloth or rags as they previously did.

The entire process of producing sanitary napkins with this machine consists of three steps — de-fibration, which creates the material that forms the napkins, core formation, where the napkin is formed, and finally soft-touch sealing which as the name suggests seals the napkin at both ends.

The post production sterilisation and manufacturing process makes the napkins ready for sale. The entire process takes a total of 4-5 minutes.

The napkins generated by this process are perfect for rural women who are often
engaged in strenuous field work during the day.

The machine is also capable of producing customised sanitary napkins to suit different women’s needs.

This easy-to-use model also addresses the issue of
unemployment within rural areas. Each sanitary napkin making unit creates employment for about 6 to 10 women. Besides, the design of the machine is quite simple and the training period for handling this machine is just one day.

Muruganantham’s invention was awarded the National Innovation Foundation’s ‘Fifth National Grassroots Technological Innovations and Traditional Knowledge Award’ in 2009 in New Delhi, by president Pratibha Patil.

This year his innovation was amongst the 14 selected for IITB-Alumni Association’s ‘Innovations 2011’ event in Pune. Over 225 of his machines are currently functioning in over 15 states of India and various other countries such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya.

His machine was also
chosen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA to be deployed in Africa.

Despite of the tremendous
success his invention has achieved, Muruganantham has no plans of selling it for commercial success.

A modest man, Muruganantham believes that money should not be the aim of an endeavour.

He aspires to transfer the technological knowledge to poor countries, which face a similar plight and he supplies these machines only to self help women groups to generate employment and ensure better sanitation in rural areas.

“An innovation should
satisfy a person’s need and not his greed,” says this philanthropic entrepreneur.

Muruganantham has
ambitious dreams for the future of his invention. “I hope to have every woman shift from using dirty cloth to clean, sanitised napkins through the use of my machine,” says the social entrepreneur, a term he himself has recently been
acquainted with.