When Muruganantham asked her why she didn't use sanitary pads, she said that if she did, she wouldn't be able to afford to run the household.

Wanting to impress his young wife, Muruganantham went into town to buy her a sanitary pad. He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g of cotton should sell for four rupees. Looking into it further, he discovered that hardly any women in the surrounding villages used sanitary pads. He was shocked to learn that women don't just use rags, but other  substances such as sawdust, leaves and even ash.

So he decided to fashion his own pads.

Muruganantham managed to convince 20 students at his local medical college to try out his pads—but it still didn't quite work out. It was then that he decided to test the products on himself. "I became the man who wore a sanitary pad," he says.

He created a 'uterus' from a football bladder by punching a couple of holes in it, and filling it with goat's blood, mixed with an additive to prevent it clotting too quickly. He walked, cycled and ran with the football bladder under his clothes, constantly pumping blood out to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates. Everyone thought he'd gone mad. The whole village concluded he had a sexual disease.

At the same time, his wife got fed up—and left. "You see God's sense of humour," he says in the documentary Menstrual Man. "I'd started the research for my wife and after 18 months she left me!"

Then he had another brainwave—he would study used sanitary pads. He supplied his group of medical students with sanitary pads and collected them afterwards. He laid his haul out in the back yard, only for his mother to stumble across the grisly scene one day. She cried, put her sari on the ground, put her belongings into it, and left.

Worse was to come. The villagers became convinced he was possessed by evil spirits, and were about to chain him upside down to a tree. He only narrowly avoided this by agreeing to leave the village. "I was left all alone in life."

Still, he carried on. Muruganantham wrote to the big manufacturing companies and spent almost 7,000 rupees on telephone calls. He told them he was a textile mill owner who was thinking of moving into the business, and requested samples. Soon, hard boards appeared in the mail—cellulose. It had taken more than two years to discover what sanitary pads are made of, but there was a snag—the machine required to turn the material into pads cost many thousands of dollars.  Four-and-a-half years later, he succeeded in creating a low-cost method for the production of sanitary towels involving four simple steps. First, a machine breaks down the cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine. The cakes are then wrapped in non-woven cloth and disinfected in an ultraviolet treatment unit. The whole process can be learned in an hour.

Muruganantham's goal was not just to increase the use of sanitary pads, but also to create jobs for rural women. The machines are kept deliberately simple so that they can be maintained by the women themselves. The first model was mostly made of wood, and when he showed it to the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, scientists were skeptical—how was this man going to compete against multinationals?

But Muruganantham had confidence. Besides, his aim was not really to compete with the big companies. "We are creating a new market," he says.

Unbeknown to him, the IIT entered his machine in a competition for a national innovation award. Out of 943 entries, it came first. He was given the award by the then President of India, Pratibha Patil—quite an achievement for a school dropout.

Muruganantham seemed set for fame and fortune, but he was not interested in profit. "Imagine, I got patent rights to the only machine in the world to make low-cost sanitary napkins," he says. "Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty—everything happens because of ignorance."

It took Muruganantham 18 months to build 250 machines, which he took out to the poorest states in Northern India—Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Here, women often have to walk for miles to fetch water, something they can't do when they are menstruating.

Slowly, village by village, there was cautious acceptance and over time the machines spread to 1,300 villages in 23 states. In each case, it's the women who produce the sanitary pads who sell them directly to the customer. When customers get them from women they know, they can also acquire important information on how to use them.

Most of Muruganantham's clients are NGOs and women's self-help groups. He also works with schools.

The Indian government recently announced it would distribute subsidised sanitary products to poorer women. It was a blow for Muruganantham that it did not choose to work with him, but he now has his eyes on the wider world. "My aim was to create one million jobs for poor women—but why not 10 million jobs worldwide?" he asks. He is expanding to 106 countries across the globe.

(BBC)