This is not a fiction, a love story or a thriller. This is a story of Super Hero who doesn’t have any super powers, though he is saving many lives.
Arunachalam Muruganantham is a man with super talent born in Tamil Nadu, India. He is the inventor of low-cost sanitary pad making machine. He brought awareness in women in rural India about unhygienic and traditional methods using during menstruation.
Mr.Muruganantham was born in 1962 in Tamil Nadu, India. His parents were handloom weavers. His mother’s real struggle started when his father passed away in an accident. Due to poverty he left school at the age of 14. At this tender age he started taking various jobs like supplying food to the factory workers, selling yams, operating on machines, wielding, etc.
In the year 1998, he got married to Shanti. One day he saw his wife Shanti hiding something at her back. He then discovered that his wife is using old rags during her menstrual cycle, which is a very unhygienic method. On asking her wife, that why she don’t use sanitary pads, she replied that she knows using old rags is unhygienic but if she start using pads then they have to cut down on their meal. This was very surprising for him. He went to a pharmacy and bought sanitary pads. He opened the packet to analyse, why they are so expensive. He then found that it is made up of mere cotton, which is worth 10 paise (cents) and they are selling a pad for 4 rupees (dollars). Due to this reason his wife had to adopt an unhygienic method during menstruation.
Muruganantham decided to make sanitary pads on his own. As he started with his experiment, he needed female volunteers to use these pads and give him the reviews. His first volunteer was his wife Shanti. Her first review was awful; she said she would rather use a rag than using his experimental pads. He didn’t give up on his experiments and made pads with innovations, but the issue was waiting for a month’s time to test his experiment. He than approached to his sisters and asked them to use these pads. But he needed more volunteers. So, he approached the female medical students with a belief that a medical student wouldn’t shy away from giving their reviews. But unfortunately it didn’t happen, in fact his family didn’t tolerate his behaviour and it created a serious problem in his married life. He got a divorce notice from his wife. Then he decided to test his experiment on himself. He started wearing pad and kept a ball full of animal blood near bladder with a tube connecting to the pad. When he used to exert pressure on the ball the blood used to travel from the tube and spill on the pad. This made him a subject of ridicule.
After struggling for almost two years, he discovered that the commercial pads used cellulose fiber, which helps the pads to absorb and retain their shape. Cellulose fiber is derived from pine bark wood pulp. The imported machines that made pads worth 35 million rupees. So he started working on a machine that would perform all the procedures performed by the imported machine. It took him four years to make this machine. The machine that he innovated is worth 65,000 rupees. It is the cheapest sanitary pad-making machine.
In the year 2006, he visited IIT Madras with his innovation where he received few suggestions. His innovation was registered for the National Innovation Foundation and he won the award. Being a school dropout couldn’t stop Arunachalam Muruganantham from discovering such a tool that could benefit a woman. During his research he found that only 2% women are using sanitary pads in India and rest of the ladies have to adopt an unhygienic traditional way due to unaffordable cost of pads.
Mr. Arunachalam Muruganantham couldn’t speak good English, but he was been invited to give lectures on his innovation in IIT Mumbai, IIM Banglore and Harvard. He has fought against all odds; neither language nor poverty could stop him. The mission that he stared for his wife Shanti had become a mission of his life. His goal is to create jobs for ladies in rural India and today he is successful in installing his pad-making machines in 23 states of India. In his TED talk he mentioned that I don’t run after money, my invention is for philanthropy.
Picture Coutresy : Google