Pad Man- the entrepreneur behind India's low-cost sanitary pad revolution
Prince Peter 15th March 2024 updated.
Women menstruate.
His mother and sisters apparently did too, but Muruganantham Arunachalam realized this fact only in his mid-30s, when he saw his newlywed wife trying to hide some dirty rags during her periods.
He was shocked to discover that women in his village, in Coimbatore district of Tamilnadu, India regularly used newspapers, rags, dried leaves, husk and even ash as menstrual protection.
However, this is just one of the many ills rooted in taboos and superstitions related to menstruation.
Ignorance has fed ignorance and menstrual blood is considered unclean in most societies and is sometimes even associated with witchcraft. Menstrual taboo forbids menstruating women from places of worship, kitchens and even family gatherings. It also forces millions of girls out of schools when faced with inadequate protection and lack of girls' toilets.
The taboo, and lack of affordability, also means that nearly 88% of Indian women are deprived of healthy options during menstruation; in many rural areas, access to sanitary napkins may be as low as 2%. The resultant unhygienic practices and use of dirty materials, exposes nearly 70% of these women to infections and cervical cancer.
Our attitudes have not changed much. Even today, in shops across most Indian towns and cities, menstrual pads are packed under the counter with newspapers or anonymous black covers, and handed over surreptitiously like contraband.
Like the worst of our differences and our failings and our failures, this tragedy too continues to be perpetuated by our unwillingness to honestly communicate with ourselves - and with each other.
Blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.
Helen Keller
On the road to creating the world's first low-cost machinery for manufacturing sanitary towels, and almost single-handedly developing an affordable, scalable model for producing inexpensive sanitary pads in India, Muruganantham Muruga
Arunachalam would finally understand that "affordability, availability, and awareness" are the keys to solving this colossal problem.
But in 1998 when Muruga gifted his wife a pack of costly factory-made sanitary pads, he lacked knowledge of the huge issue - or the huge opportunity - represented by menstrual protection. He was simply trying to be a good husband.
When he realized that regular purchase of those expensive menstrual pads was impossible within the limited family budget, he took an entrepreneur's distinctive path: he resolved to make them himself.
Muruga pilfered a menstrual pad from the pack he had gifted his wife and tore it open. Inside was what looked to him like compressed cotton. Hah! What could be easier than putting some cotton together?
Possessing an eclectic exposure to entrepreneurial work including a food supply business, a yam selling agency, a welding business, and the family owned hand-loom weaving business, Muruga was fully confident of quickly duplicating the pad.
He sewed up some soft cotton procured from a nearby textile mill, and confidently presented the pad to his wife. After trying to use it, his wife reported disdainfully that it was useless
and returned to using rags.
Muruga was taken aback by this utter failure.
Whether you think you can or you think you can't - you are right.
Henry Ford
Muruga realized that the obvious issue was the material, and started experimenting with different materials for his pads.
His wife and sisters, somewhat reluctantly agreed to test
the homemade pads, but reported back again and again with reticent yet crushingly negative feedback. Soon, however, they had had enough. His main test subjects, his sister and wife, always unenthusiastic, refused any further participation in his product development efforts.
When an undaunted Muruga approached other women in the village to volunteer for the trials, with offers of free pads if they returned the used ones for research, he was met with unbelieving shock and accusations of black magic.
So, Muruganantham took the path of the genuine entrepreneur: he started testing the pads himself. He used a football bladder to pump goat's blood treated with anti-coagulant into his underpants and continued testing a variety of pads fashioned by him.
Murmurs of disgust and anger had been growing in his village and the goat's blood experiment proved to be final straw for many in his village.
The age-old taboo surrounding menstruation made him an object of ridicule.
First, his mother, and then his wife, left him.
He was threatened with communal boycott.
He knew that all he had to do to regain it all was to abandon his obsession with dirty blood
. He refused.
And Muruganantham was forced out of his village.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
Undaunted by reverses that would have defeated lesser souls, Muruga continued his entrepreneurial quest.
Realizing that real progress depended on urgently acquiring a larger set of test subjects, he convinced a group of medical college students residing in a women's hostel to test his products.
Sensing that giving face-to-face feedback created further reluctance, he devised feedback forms to overcome that hurdle.
With undeterred entrepreneurial verve, Muruga continued developing better pads using new methods and materials. Despite all his work however success still seemed unattainable.
The reason was simple: Muruga had fundamentally misunderstood the composition of the menstrual pad - menstrual pads are not made of cotton! The modern menstrual pad is not made from cotton but from covered compacted cellulose derived from pine bark.
Without ready access to technology or knowledge resources, what might take us 25 seconds to discover today, took Muruganantham Arunachalam two years of painstaking research and investigation to uncover.
At last, Muruga had the right material!
Though Muruga at last had found the right material, the existing technology for pad making used expensive machinery that cost crores, and did not tie in with his entrepreneurial vision of servicing the huge untapped market for inexpensive, affordable sanitary pads for the rural Indian woman.
Muruganantham was determined to develop a easy and cost-effective solution, and his actual solution was simple and direct.
Using a makeshift workshop, he developed and refined a two-part machine that did the job effectively. The first machine section broke the compacted cellulose into fluffy fibrous strands, while the second compressed the soft material to pad thickness. The electric powered machine could produce two napkins per minute.
After several more attempts and failures, at last in 2004, Muruga delivered a new batch of pads, produced using his machinery, to the medical students. A few days later, impatiently hurrying back for the test results, one of the women volunteers stopped him with a wide grin, even before he had reached the hostel gate.
He knew the result before he heard her say, When I use your napkin, I forget I'm having my period.
He had achieved the primary purpose of an entrepreneur (Who is an entrepreneur?) - to offer value and happiness to another human being.
Muruganantham's patented invention soon won recognition and awards for innovation. He also received seed funding to formally launch his business.
After six years of resolute effort and countless setbacks, these victories might have seemed like cause for celebration. Muruganantham, however, grasped that the greater battle was yet to be won.
Profitably achieving distribution, market adoption, and customers required that Muruga had to devise a business model that was radically different from his billion-dollar competitors such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble.
While the production aspect of the business had been resolved by his invention, he realized that extreme economy in distribution, marketing, and retailing was essential for the new product's success. Muruganantham devised an entrepreneur-oriented distribution model wherein his ₹75,000 machines would be sold together with raw material supplies and adequate training to small business units or self-help groups.
He also dramatically lowered retailing and marketing costs by cleverly deciding to concentrate on small-towns and rural markets where word of mouth might suffice for publicity.
With an all-in cost of each pad approximating ₹1.50, Muruga calculated that a 50% profit margin and a price of ₹3 per unit, would still enable the pads to be sold at prices 50-80% lower than the market leaders.
Muruga was ready to grow his startup.
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
William Faulkner
In 2006 Muruganantham Arunachalam launched Jayaashree Industries to realize his vision of offering low-cost, easily accessible menstrual pads to low-income rural Indian women.
Muruga started by marketing the concept with extensive field trips across rural India. Despite some initial antagonistic reactions, resulting from deep-rooted prejudices about menstruation, after months of rigorous evangelizing his vision at last started becoming reality.
Muruganantham's decentralized manufacturing model was a hit with small entrepreneurs, self-help groups, non-profit organizations, and state government agencies. As the new millennium progressed, several women's cooperatives and rural NGOs across India set up sanitary pad manufacturing units using Muruga's invention.
Apart from developing own local brands relevant to their small markets, these independent units also built their own locality-wise marketing wings. Often headed by women "resident dealers" these units aided the larger purpose of educating the locality's women about menstrual hygienic.
Over 225 women's entrepreneurial ventures, employing over 7,500 women, have sprung up in 23 states across India, using Muruga's inventive business model. His machines are being used in over a dozen other countries, including Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Nepal.
Eschewing large-scale production models and focusing on developing more entrepreneurs has been highly satisfying to Muruganantham Arunachalam: Our model encourages women to participate in complete product life-cycles, not only as users, but also as technology designers, manufacturers, and marketing persons. Further, these women are the owners of their business. Through this model, they can live with dignity.
(more awesome quotes about entrepreneurship by awesome people)
To keep the business in line with his dream of making hygiene affordable for all women he has reportedly refused multiple offers from larger companies to buy his patents and business.
Muruganantham's business innovation has won him worldwide acclaim as an agent of social change. He has been the subject of an award-winning documentary Menstrual Man and the hit movie Pad Man, and is regularly invited for guest lectures at premier business schools.
Muruga has won several awards for his social and business innovations, and his work has encouraged similar entrepreneurial efforts using organic, eco-friendly materials.
Along with material and business success, Muruga has won back his family and friends. His wife and mother have returned to him, and his village has officially apologized to him.
Unlike most of the other entrepreneurs profiled in Blazetrue, Muruganantham's business can be considered to be in its infancy. The ultimate impact of his work will have to be portrayed in another story, in the future.
However, what he has already accomplished is a victory over adversity that needs to wait for no future judgment. Muruganantham Arunachalam is yet another entrepreneur who has underlined that the secret behind any entrepreneur's failure or success is this: as much as other people can help or hinder you, the only person who can defeat you is yourself.
Personally, apart from business, I admire a person who shows the way for empathy between people, between genders: because only a sincere attempt to understand others can make our social contract meaningful.
The best, the most real answers to all important questions will always be the ones you find for yourself in your journey as an entrepreneur; but I do hope that my writing serves as additional signposts in your search for those answers.
Thanks again for your time and attention.
Signing off with my best wishes for your business venture,
P.S. each word you have read above is written by me, Prince Peter, and I take personal responsibility for all I have said.
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