Recasting India (22 page)

Around five years later, his eldest brother got some work at Mantralaya, the government secretariat in Bombay, and Zode, who had just finished school, joined his brother in the city, replicating that old lesson that the city often sets the Dalit free.

The brothers started a small poultry business in the satellite town of Alibaug. Soon business grew and Zode opened a gas agency in the area of Bombay called Byculla, which, then as in many parts now, was a mafia den.

“That's where I learnt the value of politeness and that in order to do business, you can never be the first one to get angry,” he says.

When he married, he steered his microbiologist wife toward business and started Hindustan Insecticides. “For me, the lesson of Ambedkar is—never let an opportunity go to waste. We Dalits don't get that many opportunities,” says Zode, who now lives in a Rs 4 crore ($674,000) home in tony Bandra in the heart of Bombay, and drives a C-class Mercedes to work.

But he didn't allow his son to go to America for a degree. “I was very clear—if you get admission to a top engineering college or a management institute in India, then you can go abroad. I will know that you have the capability to be the best. But if he can't crack that, then it is only my money that is sending him abroad—what is the point of that?” asks Zode.

He says that what he has done for his children is this: “When they come out of their Bandra home and meet their friends, no one calls out to them by their caste as they used to call to me and my siblings in our village.”

 

“You know what I am, right?” Arunachalam Muruganantham told me. “I am a pervert. That's why my wife left me, my mother left me. They were scared that I have gone crazy.”

But why did they think so?

“Because of all the things I was doing, you see. I was asking young college girls about their periods, I was asking them for sanitary napkins, I was asking them what works best in a sanitary napkin.

“Even my wife was reluctant to discuss all these things with me—so forget the other girls. But when I persisted, everyone thought I was mad, or a pervert. They told me go and get some treatment done!”

Then he laughed steadily for some time. He laughs in a curious way, as if in between the guffaws something is hurting him. In conversation, he says the most devastating things quickly followed by a joke. For instance, he will say—my wife left me. Then quickly say—sometimes I had to wear a sanitary pad myself to test it. Then laugh again.

Muruganantham is perhaps India's most radical entrepreneur. He would easily be one of the most radical in the world. He is 46 years old and is a Class 9 school dropout. Till about ten years ago, he was a workshop mechanic in the village of Pappanaickenpudur in the southern town of Coimbatore. He had what he calls the “idyllic, very poor life.”

“I used to earn very little and later on when I learnt the phrase ‘stay-at-home husband,' I thought that was the right description for me. So these days when someone asks me about that phase of my life, I say I was a stay-at-home husband,” says Muruganantham.

Then something happened that transformed him into one of India's most cutting-edge innovators. What does he make? He created a machine that can make some of the cheapest but good-quality sanitary napkins in the world. It is a machine that has been sold in 1,300 locations in India and around the world including in Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Mauritius, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Mozambique and even America.

The total business done by all the units is around Rs 150 crores ($25 million) a year but Muruganantham makes very little of that money. He sells the machine for only Rs 75,000 ($1,264) each. His own unit in Coimbatore makes a turnover of only Rs 5 crore ($843,000) a year. His vision is that in every part of the world, low-cost sanitary napkins can be made and used until not a single woman anywhere in the world is without a pad when she needs one.

This for a machine for whose patent Muruganantham had to sell blood. His patent for the machine was pending at the Indian Institute of Technology when he was asked to return repeatedly for clarifications. On one such call, he realized that he did not have the money to travel from his village to Chennai—about 6 or 7 hours away. “I was a frequent blood donor. And that time, I realized that for once let me donate blood not because someone needs it but because I desperately need the money.” He got Rs 200 for his donation, made the trip and got his patent.

This is a revolutionary achievement for an Indian man—especially with the means and background of Muruganantham. But more on that in a bit. First, let's look at why this kind of innovation is vital in a country like India.

Only about 12 percent of India's 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins, says a 2011 AC Nielsen and Plan India survey called “Sanitary Protection: Every Women's Health Right.”
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In 2010, the Ministry of Health announced a Rs 150 crore ($25 million) scheme to bring access to sanitary napkins to girls in rural areas, but the impact of the scheme is yet to be measured. The Plan India Survey conducted across 1,033 women of menstrual age and 151 gynecologists throughout India showed that improper menstrual protection makes adolescent girls (age group 12–18 years) miss five days of school in a month, and around 23 percent of these girls actually drop out of school after they start menstruating. The biggest challenge, said the survey, is affordability: around 70 percent of women cannot afford to buy pads.

Compared to India's 12 percent, in Japan and Singapore 100 percent of women use sanitary pads, as do 64 percent in China and 88 percent in Indonesia. Talking about menstrual health is largely difficult and full of societal taboo. In many places in India, menstruating women are kept away from temples and kitchens, and some don't even bathe. Gynecologists condemn such practices, suggesting that women who are menstruating should bathe more than twice a day and change sanitary towels thrice. Almost all gynecologists believe that the use of sanitary pads reduces the risk of disease, including cervical cancer. The survey conducted across the cities of Delhi, Chennai, Calcutta, Bangalore, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Gorakhpur, Aurangabad and Vijayawada showed that around 31 percent of women reported a drop in productivity levels during their periods. The situation was worst in eastern India, where 83 percent of the women spoken to said they could not afford sanitary napkins, and in northern India, where 30 percent of girls dropped out of school after hitting menstrual age.

One day in 1998, Muruganantham noticed his new wife sneaking past him to the bathroom carrying something in her

hand. He asked her what it was. She wouldn't tell him and asked him to mind his own business.

“No matter how many times I asked her she wouldn't tell me. Then I noticed that it was a dirty piece of rag, so filthy that I wouldn't even use it for cleaning my machines in the workshop,” says Muruganantham.

“I realized that she was using this cloth as her menstruating cloth.”

So he asked his wife why she did not use a sanitary pad. Shanthi, his wife, told him that she couldn't afford it. “‘Either it is milk or vegetables or my pad—we can't have all three,' she told me,” says Muruganantham. “For the first time in my life, I felt very poor.”

Muruganantham had some money saved up, so he took that and went to the nearby village shop to buy a sanitary pad for his wife. This was the first time in his life he had done two things—the first time he had discussed menstruation with anyone, let alone a woman, and the first time he had ever held a packet of sanitary pads in his hand. So he was amazed at how light it was. He says it immediately occurred to him that this was largely cotton wool.

“I calculated in my head that this much cotton wool would not cost more than 10 paisa—but the price was about Rs 4 per pad. It was a huge profit margin. In fact, I was amazed that there could be such a profit margin in something like sanitary pads,” says he. That's when he decided that he wanted to make and sell sanitary pads. But there were critical hurdles.

For instance, he had no idea that menstruation was a monthly cycle. The first pad that was made by Muruganantham was given to Shanthi. She was asked to give feedback. “She slapped me on the head and told me that I was crazy. That was the first time that I got to know that this is a monthly cycle! But how would one

know? Who talks about these things in an Indian village? That was also the beginning of people calling me mad.”

The pad maker figured that if he depended on his wife alone as a testing volunteer, it would take years before he would be able to develop anything. But how would be ever be able to find other testing volunteers?

As he hunted for women who would test his products, Muruganantham began to research a problem he knew almost nothing about. He realized that in most parts of India, especially in rural India, menstrual hygiene is almost nonexistent. The branded sanitary napkins are either too expensive or there is no awareness that they even exist. Even if people know that napkins exist, most of them don't know why they are important. “I did not know that word at that time but I later learnt that I had discovered a new market, a barely penetrated market—all these big words I didn't know. I just knew that here was a product that was essential for good health and it was missing for most Indian women,” he says. He also discovered that women were using not just dirty rags but even leaves and ash and sand as menstrual protection.

Medical research shows that almost three-fourths of all reproductive diseases in India come from lack of menstrual hygiene, and women are often too embarrassed to dry their menstrual cloths in the sun—which means these rags never get disinfected.

In his hunt for volunteers, Muruganantham tried to rope in his sisters. “But after some time, each time I went to ask them something, they would call my mother and say ‘ask him to go away.' ”

He then tried approaching students at a local medical college. But this was another hurdle—he had never approached an unknown woman and spoken to her. How could he now approach women with this?

There was a big class difference involved. Here was the barely literate son of a handloom weaver facing girls who were studying at a college. It took an enormous leap of imagination for him to try to approach them at all—certainly to talk about menstruation. He even tried asking them for used sanitary napkins—which, to say the least, got him into more trouble in the village. What was a man doing going up to college girls and asking for their used sanitary napkins? But he persisted and eventually gathered enough used napkins to study how absorption of blood happens in various napkins.

Yet he needed more information than the girls would give, so he turned to the only person who could help—himself. He made a contraption that had a football bladder filled with goat's blood and connected it to a sanitary napkin that he wore; wearing that contraption, he cycled to see the absorption of the blood in the pad when it oozed out. He called this apparatus his “uterus”; the goat's blood came from an old childhood friend who was a butcher. The butcher let Muruganantham know each time a goat was about to be slaughtered, and he rushed to collect the blood and get a chemical from another friend at a blood bank to prevent it from clotting. This would go into his “uterus”—and into his sanitary napkin. The one that he would wear when he cycled or walked every day.

This changed his tag—from mad to pervert. Each day Muruganantham went about his work and business wearing his blood squeezer and his sanitary napkins. His wife, Shanthi, who had been patient about his interest, finally left him. This was barely two years after he had first gone to buy a sanitary pad for her.

One of his best anecdotes comes from this period—one Sunday, he laid out many of his bloodied sanitary napkins on a rundown table in the backyard of his cottage. His mother was returning from the village bazaar and saw splattered blood behind the hut.

“She thought, it is a Sunday, so maybe my son has brought home a chicken and is cleaning it up for dinner!”

When she saw what her son was doing, that was the final falling out between mother and son. Like his wife, Muruganantham's mother too left him. “By this time, it had become renowned in the village that there was something wrong with me,” he says. “There were many symptoms. I wore a sanitary napkin, I was always doing something with blood and bloody sanitary napkins, and I seemed to be interested in bloody sanitary napkins of other girls but not interested enough in my wife.

“Why else would she have left me? But my mother leaving me was even worse. What would I have done that even my own mother would desert me?”

During this time, Muruganantham would happily put his clothes with blood stains out to dry outside his hut for everyone to see. “That triggered the invisible Facebook and Twitter of the village. You know, every Indian village has invisible Facebook and Twitter. No information or gossip can be hidden—and I had become the biggest topic of gossip!”