India’s ‘Menstrual Man’ on mission to improve feminine hygiene

A 49-year-old father is championing the use of sanitary pads among India’s poor

A school dropout from a poor family in southern India marked International Women’s Day yesterday by giving a talk about menstrual hygiene to 3,000 women in Mumbai, the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra.

Arunachalam Muruganantham (49) has, over the past two decades, become an unlikely champion for Indian women, only 12 per cent of whom use sanitary pads, according to a 2011 survey by AC Nielsen, commissioned by the Indian government. In rural areas of the country, the take-up is far less than that, says Muruganantham.

“Indian women buy food first, then things like shampoo and soap, and finally sanitary pads,” he told The Irish Times over the phone. “They see them as an unnecessary expense.” But the money they are “saving” they spend on doctors’ fees, he said. In India, about 70 per cent of all reproductive diseases are caused by poor menstrual hygiene, which can also affect maternal mortality.

Crusade
Muruganantham’s interest in feminine hygiene began in the early days of his arranged marriage, when he discovered his wife, Shanthi, was using a rag instead of a pad. “I would not even use it to clean my scooter,” he said. If she bought sanitary pads, Shanthi told him, she wouldn’t be able to afford to buy milk or run the household. Muruganantham set out to buy his young wife a sanitary pad and ended up on a crusade to revolutionise menstrual health for poor rural women.

He decided he could make cheaper sanitary pads himself, and then he invented simple machinery that put the process into the hands of rural women, not only improving menstrual hygiene and beginning to dismantle long-held myths about women’s health, but also providing a much-needed livelihood to women in villages across India. “About 80-90 per cent of women in India depend on men for money,” said Muruganantham. “With this they can stand on their own legs.”

His “silent white revolution”, as he calls it, didn’t come easily. In a 2013 documentary film called Menstrual Man , Muruganantham tells how his struggle to find willing volunteers in his village left him with no choice but to test his pads himself, with the use of an artificial uterus (a football) and goats blood. The villagers didn’t take kindly to his interest in such a taboo topic, and after 18 months his wife left him; then his mother.

But Muruganantham persisted and has spread his model of business – “I don’t want to scale up. I want to scale deep” – to villages all over India and other underdeveloped countries, taking on a billion-dollar industry along the way. These days, he gets invitations from around the world to talk about his success. “I have a bag full of boarding passes,” he said.

Ostracised
Women across the world, he says, face the same problem. “Women are the pillars of the family, not the man. They know their responsibilities better than the man. The universe is bonded together and that bond, that glue, its name is mother.”

He still lives in the village that once ostracised him (“Many people run away to the big city, to become a tycoon. I stay.”) and has been reunited with his wife, with whom he has a six-year-old daughter, Preeti. Asked what his hopes are for her future, he said: “I just want her to grow like a butterfly, to be a creative girl. Everyone is chasing money, thinking you make money to come out from the crowd. Help society and you can come out from the crowd. Look what I could do with my little knowledge.”