This social enterprise enables women to produce low-cost, biodegradable sanitary pads

Right from his school days in West Bengal, Jaydeep Mandal (30) was obsessed with innovations. He envisioned bringing about innovative solutions to daily-life problems by using minimum resources. An entrepreneur at heart, he aimed to bring grass-root innovations to the market and monetise them.

Mandal has neatly tied up all his objectives into Aakar Innovations, a social enterprise which manufactures Anandi sanitary napkins — the only 100% biodegradable sanitary napkins in the country.

Twenty-five manufacturing units (five of which produce only compostable sanitary napkins) across the country are using the machines designed by Aakar, which was started in 2011, to create the pads.

While Aakar does not own all the units, it works in tandem with local NGOs to run them. For example, the one in Dharavi is run in association with the Society for Human and Environmental Development (SHED).

"We provide technical support and look after the marketing and distribution, but the day-to-day running of the unit is supervised by the NGO," Mandal said. Delhi NCR, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and West Bengal are some of the places where Aakar has a presence.

Anandi caters to women from rural areas and urban slums and low income groups. The primary aim of Aakar is to improve menstrual sanitation among these women who use cloth, hay, sand, ash and other such unhygienic alternatives.

"We realised that in villages, owing to the conservative nature of the community, women avoid using sanitary napkins as they don't know how to dispose them. That intrigued us to work on a compostable alternative," explained Mandal, who holds an engineering degree and resides in Belapur. However, he acknowledged that it is a long battle. "They don't fully understand the benefits of pads being compostable. Besides, for them, sanitary pads are an expensive affair."

While Anandi is sold at a considerably lesser price than its non-biodegradable, mainstream counterpart, it is still viewed as an indulgence by these women, who are mostly daily-wage earners.

This necessity to bring about an attitude change led to the creation of Aakar Social Ventures, which works towards raising menstrual hygiene awareness among rural women. "We want to enable the women to make informed choices. But this has to be done without bringing up religion and culture. They look at that as if we are trying to dispute something they have been following for years," Mandal added.

Additionally, it imparts entrepreneurial and business skills training to village-level entrepreneurs to help them enforce and sustain livelihood opportunities. Thus, in all the manufacturing units, Aakar employs needy women from the surrounding community. "The biggest impact of Aakar has been the number of women employed. We have employed nearly 500 of them," said Mandal.

Headquartered in Belapur, Aakar is now looking to expand internationally. Production of organic tampons and baby diapers is also on its mind.