The Man Who Devoted His Life to Break the Taboo of Menstruation In India

How a little-educated man becomes one of the most influential people on earth

Born into a low-income family, the barely educated village mechanic, Arunachalam Muruganantham, changed the lives of millions of Indian women with his low-cost sanitary pad machine. It enabled rural women to use pads, which they could not afford before. A man became the advocate of women in a country where menstruation is the biggest taboo.

The story of Arunachalam mirrors the deeply rooted and questionable traditions of the Indian countryside. Menstruating women still need to sleep outside the house with no access to food in some parts of India. They are advised to suspend their prayers to the Gods, as during this time, they remain unheard. Several girls drop out of school because they cannot change their clothes discretely with so many boys around.

The “Period. End of Sentence”, an Oscar-winning documentary released on Netflix, displays the persisting stigma about menstruation and the lack of knowledge in rural Indian society.

“It is a woman’s disease.” — says a boy about women’s bleeding.

The Road to the Worldwide Reputation

It all started in the Indian city of Coimbatore in 1998. The 29-year-old fresh husband, Arunachalam Muruganantham, noticed that his wife, Shanti, hid something behind her back. It was a dirty rag. So dirty that the man thought he would not even use it to clean his bike, but his wife used it during her menstruation.

The man ran to the local shop, where he asked for sanitary pads. The shopkeeper nervously wrapped it in newspaper and handed it over to Arunachalam as if it was some illegal stuff.

However, Shanti refused the much more hygienic sanitary pads because it was much costlier and his husband’s involvement in women’s things embarrassed her. Most Indian families could not afford to buy pads.

Only 10% of women had access to sanitary napkins. Some girls only saw it on TV. All they knew was that it was possible to go anywhere with that. Instead, they use newspapers, ashes, leaves, or sawdust, often leading to fatal infections.

However, Muruganantham did not give up on that. He was eager to produce the cheaper version of the sanitary pads so that more countryside women could use them. He first analyzed the pad’s structure, then bought cotton at one of the many local textile mills and produced it at home.

He encountered countless problems on the way. First, he needed a woman to test it. He persuaded his wife to try it, but his first product failed. Though giving up was not an option for him. He learned from his mistakes and tried to come up every time with a better version of that.

Since his wife, family, and the village were deeply embarrassed by Arunachalam’s obsession with sanitary pads, he had to look for other voluntaries for his experimentations. So he approached the medical students attending the nearby university. Despite being more educated, they were also averse to talk to a man about the subject. So Muruganantham compiled a questionnaire and forwarded it with the product samples to the girls. He was highly disappointed to discover that only three girls cooperated, and they filled out the survey in their classmates’ names.

It pushed him to try the sanitary pad himself: he filled a sports bottle with animal blood, attached a tube to it, and thus simulated monthly bleeding for five days while performing his usual daily activities. He went to work, was walking and cycling with that. This overly unpleasant experience — annoyed by the feeling of moisture and soaking his pants several times — increased his compassion and respect for women. He made fool of himself in front of the entire village when his pants got soaked with the fake blood.

His family and friends started to question his sanity and saw him as perverted. His wife became suspicious that her husband was coveting the medical students in the hope of a relationship. She filed for divorce, and soon after, her widowed mother disowned him.

Arunachalam did not give up even then. He found out what had been wrong with his attempts so far: the material inside the pad was not simple cotton but a unique cellulose fiber extracted from the pine tree’s bark. It absorbed the liquid and prevented leakage. However, he ran into another obstacle. He needed a half-million-dollar machine to process it. He did not back down this time either.

It took four and a half years for him to invent a low-cost and easy-to-use alternative for the commercially available sanitary napkin machine that can crush, compact, wrap and sterilize at the same time.

When the machine was ready, he applied for the innovation competition of the Indian Institute of Technology in 2009, and he won the first prize out of 943 participants.

Women’s Empowerment Comes First, Money Remains Secondary

However, the success story did not continue in the usual scenario. He refused to sell the patent because he did not want that the multinational corporations yield the profit. His goal was never to get rich but to help the people and spread menstrual hygiene across India, especially in backward villages, while helping to break the taboo associated with monthly bleeding.

His goal is to increase the proportion of Indian women having access to proper menstrual hygiene products to 100 percent in his lifetime.

Realizing the noble intention behind his husband’s effort, Shanti returned to his husband, and they got blessed with a daughter.

Arunachalam relentlessly manufactures machines since then: more than 600 have now been installed in 23 states of India and have been introduced in other developing countries as well. Several universities invited Muruganantham to give a speech, who dropped out of school when he was 14!

Underprivileged women get the machine delivered through self-supporting financial groups: 10–20 women jointly take out a group loan for the device, which they can quickly repay with the constant demand for the product. Thus, thousands of rural women get paid jobs first time in their lives.

One machine employs ten people and helps approximately three thousand women switch from unhygienic methods to sanitary pads. A machine produces 200, 250 inserts per day, priced at $ 0.03 each.

Padman Muruganantham

The Time magazine chose Muruganantham as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014 and got a high acknowledgment from his country. He has been since invited to tell his story around the world. I highly recommend watching his truly inspirational TEDx talk, where he tells his story and mission to help women of rural India in a funny way.

The Bollywood film, Padman, released in 2018, became a blockbuster with Akshay Kumar famous Bollywood actor starring Muruganantham. The film further encouraged women’s empowerment: the Ministry of Railways, for example, installed a pad machine in the washrooms of two hundred stations.

I love the inspiring story of a simple Indian man who proved that persistence and the will to do good to others are crucial to success and happy life. In a country where menstruation is the biggest taboo, a man became the advocate of women and undertook a mission to change the rural Indian mindset.

What You Can Learn From the Story of Arunachalam

• Persistence and grit prevail over anything else
• Believe in your mission, and do not let yourself get discouraged by your surroundings
• If you fail, keep going and analyze the reason. Once you find it, try to improve it
• Your primary goal should be to help others, and money should be only secondary
• A single person can make a life-changing impact in others’ lives

Thanks for reading!

If you want to read more of my writings, you may check out the following articles.

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