The Man with the Sanitary Pads
Arunachalam Muruganantham
It’s not about Ideas.
It’s about making Ideas Happen.
The trailer for Akshay Kumar’s biographical comedy drama film PadMan is out and has already garnered over 30 million views. The promising movie is inspired from the journey of a real-life exemplary PadMan Arunachalam Muruganantham, an innovator and social entrepreneur hailing from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
In 1998, when Muruganantham saw his wife use old rags as sanitary pads, he decided to take matter into his own hands and change things, thus embarking on an incredible journey that turned the school drop-out into the big name that he is now.He made a prototype sanitary pad that failed miserably but he recognized it for what it was: one of the many failures on the way to success. Continuing to experiment more and with different materials, he tested them on his wife and sisters who, after a few trials, refused to use them any further.
Seeking volunteers, he approached the students of a nearby medical college who agreed to test his creations but were too shy to give their honest opinions on the experience. Muruganantham finally decided to test the pads by using them himself.He went around with a pad in his underwear and a bottle full of animal blood that would spill some on the pad at regular intervals. He was socially ostracized and labeled as a “pervert”. Even his own wife left him hoping to make him give up on his idea and even served him with a divorce notice. None of it deterred him and he continued to work as diligently as ever.
The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Following 2 years of trial and error, Muruganantham finally found out the material he needed and after another 4 years, created a manufacturing process to produce cheap and good quality sanitary pads at home. The final result manifested in the form of an easy-to-use machine for producing low-cost sanitary pads.
The machine came at just $950 in comparison to the $500,000 that was the cost of imported machines in use at that time. It was affordable by groups of women, like a school or a small society, who could now produce pads at home and sell the extra creating a source of income and employment at ground level. This also served to provide jobs for women in rural India. He had single-handedly brought about a successful revolution in his own country.
He has since then sold 1300 machines to 27 states and has recently started exporting them all over the world. Featured in 2014 Time magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential people in the world, Muruganantham is one of India’s best known social-entrepreneurs and has given lectures in Harvard, along with IITs and IIMs in India, and has also given a TED Talk in Bangalore. His fame in the small-scale innovation industry creating ripples throughout the nation has finally made the Indian movie industry recognize his staggeringly great efforts and come out with the blockbuster, ‘PadMan’.
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