The First Man To Wear A Sanitary Napkin

Necessity isn’t the only mother that Invention has. A far more popular mother is the one that urges the research and development departments of thousands of corporate firms. This mother is better known as profit or the pursuit of higher revenues. Even in cases where Necessity has given birth to Invention, there have been so many instances of the offspring being adopted by this other mother, she who thinks nothing of exploiting her children for lucre.

Recently I came to know of the third mother of Invention. The one barely anyone has heard of. Her name is Selfless Disinterest.

I had read of Arunachalam Muruganantham a few months ago in an online newspaper, but the man’s inspiring story became more real when I saw his 14.59-minute video HERE. Unsophisticated, with halting English, but superb wit, he has nevertheless earned himself the right to share his inspiring story as a visiting professor and guest lecturer at many business schools.


His claim to fame: the manufacture of a low-cost sanitary napkin.

We women, who have the money to walk up to a medical store and whisper of our desire to be carefree and stay that way, know little of the horrors suffered by 95% of women who, if they had the money, would spend it on food and other necessities. Spending it on buying a sanitary napkin seems like a waste of money when so many other needs are crying out loud. These women end up using rags, leaves of plants, husk, sawdust, even ash, to stem the monthly flow of blood.

I cannot even begin to imagine the physical distress and pain that they invite upon themselves, not to mention the indignity of having to struggle, with shame, to cope with a perfectly natural circumstance. The women also expose themselves to the risk of pelvic diseases, resulting from contamination.

When Arunachalam caught sight of his young wife hiding some rags, perhaps already used, from her husband, he asked her why she didn’t wear a sanitary napkin. He was told that it would upset the monthly budget.

So Arunachalam used precious money from that shaky budget to buy a packet of sanitary napkins. The bewildered, bemused and patronizingly pitiful expressions on the faces in the store did nothing to suppress his zeal. He was a man on a mission.

Bringing home the packet, Arunachalam dissected it into the parts that made up the sum. Surely there was some high technology at work here, he told himself. As he says in the video, he thought it might contain some hidden chip or integrated circuit that would justify the prohibitive cost. But all he found was cotton of different textures, all wrapped up in a rectangular package and glued together.

Arunachalam went to a textile mill nearby and bought cotton, which he fashioned into a rudimentary sanitary napkin. But here he faced an unexpected hurdle. Being an average male, he had no idea about monthly cycles, and was disappointed to know that he would have to wait for his wife to get her periods before she could test them. Her judgment, when she tried it, was Unsatisfactory.

Back to the drawing board Arunachalam went. He made some more. Again the wait. He tried to enroll his sisters in the testing, and was crushed to know that his enthusiasm was not shared by others. Some medical college students, asked to assist in the testing, were not comfortable with his proposition either.

And then in the interests of a cause that had little to do with his sex, let alone himself, Arunachalam tested it himself. He wore the sanitary napkin, filled a bottle with animal blood and led a connecting tube to the napkin, such that as he walked, the blood, a little at a time, would get deposited on the sanitary napkin. In the video, he laughs, calling his efforts the consequence of the Trial and Error method.

Driven on by a goal that nobody else could even begin to understand, Arunachalam invented a machine that would manufacture the low-cost napkins. His efforts were not without drastic consequences. His wife served him a divorce notice. His mother left him. He was thrown out of his village.

Today this winner of the President’s award has given 706 such machines to 23 Indian states, resulting in direct employment for 7000 rural women. And most importantly allowing 3.5 million women to embrace low-cost yet effective personal hygiene during their periods.




Anshu Gupta of Goonj is doing something similar. Mobilising people everywhere to donate items of clothing that they no longer need, Gupta’s team repurposes them into sanitary napkins for rural women.




The lasting benefits of these low-cost sanitary napkins are things that only a woman could ever fully appreciate, given the shame, the lack of awareness and the silence associated around the subject of menstruation.

The efforts of Arunachalam and Anshu remind me of an old Tamilian verse whose loose English translation I read decades ago. It says:

This world lives because
Some men do not eat alone,
not even when they get
the sweet ambrosia of the gods;

there's no faintness in their hearts
and they do not strive
for themselves.

Because such men are,
this world is.




This entry is in response to a contest organised by Indiblogger in association with Franklin Templeton Investments.
Franklin Templeton Investments partnered the TEDxGateway Mumbai in December 2012.