Arunachalam Muruganantham had seen the mysterious bloodstained rags before, left discreetly in a corner of his family’s thatched outdoor bathroom. As a teenager growing up in a village near Coimbatore in southern India, he found them unsettling and at times tried to avoid the bathroom, preferring the open fields instead. He finally deduced that the rags were left by his sisters, but what they used them for remained unclear until the time he noticed Shanthi, his wife, hiding one from him. He was in his mid-30s then, and newly married, when Shanthi explained that women menstruate, and that most of them — at least in the developing world — use rags to absorb the blood that accompanies the beginning of each menstrual cycle.
Shanthi, a short, round-faced woman with large eyes and a shy smile, knew that there were things called sanitary pads — or napkins, as they are sometimes referred to in India — designed for the same purpose. She was also aware that they were more hygienic and convenient, meant to be thrown away after each use. Why didn’t she just use pads, Muruganantham asked. “If your sisters and I start buying them,” Shanthi answered, “we will have to cut down the family’s food budget.”
Muruganantham, a stocky man with a square jaw, a pencil-thin mustache and the rough, hardened hands of somebody who has spent much of his adult life hammering and welding iron, decided to buy Shanthi a pack of sanitary pads as a gift. At the pharmacy, the shopkeeper gave him a curious look, brought out the item, then wrapped it quickly in an old newspaper to keep it hidden from the other customers. “He handed it to me as if it were a smuggled product,” Muruganantham, now 52, told me as we drove through a crowded market in Coimbatore. The pack of eight cost him 20 rupees when he purchased it in 1998 — about 50 cents, or three days’ worth of groceries.
At home, before he gave the present to his wife, Muruganantham took out one of the pads and tore it open. As a kid, he had always been driven by an extraordinary curiosity to find out how things worked; he would compulsively dismantle any new thing he could lay his hands on — toys, bicycles, radios. Muruganantham expected to see something interesting inside the pad, especially because of how furtively the shopkeeper had handed him the pack, but the innards seemed to be nothing but compressed cotton. He wondered why 10 grams of cotton — costing barely a 10th of a rupee — was being sold for a price that was beyond the reach of 90 percent of Indian women. “I am the son of a hand-loom weaver,” he told me. “I have a connection with yarn. I thought, Why not try to make an affordable sanitary pad for my wife?”
Muruganantham spent his boyhood helping his father make saris. As a child, he was given to tinkering, finding ways to improve the rope swing his friends played on, trying to build a solar incubator with a cardboard box and a magnifying glass. If he had been from a middle-class home, Muruganantham might have aspired to go to engineering or design school. But when he was in 10th grade, his father died in a traffic accident, forcing his mother to become a farmworker. Muruganantham quit school and eventually took a job at a welding workshop, learning the trade and setting up a workshop of his own.
The task he now set himself was purely personal. The day after he gave his wife the store-bought sanitary pads, he visited one of Coimbatore’s textile mills to buy the softest cotton he could find. He sewed up some in a piece of cloth and asked Shanthi to test it. “This napkin is useless,” she told him after trying it out. “I’m going back to the rag.” For Muruganantham, the comment was a “slap in the face.” But the bigger problem was that even as he developed new pads made with different materials and gave them to Shanthi and to his sisters, he received no feedback. In India’s traditional society, where women are still fighting for the right to enter places of worship while on their period, the topic of menstruation was especially taboo. “They would just give me one-word answers without elaborating,” Muruganantham said about his sisters. “They would face the wall and say, ‘No, it’s not good.’ So I didn’t know why the pad wasn’t good.”
Muruganantham felt he needed a larger population of test subjects — and gained permission to deliver his pads to a women’s dorm at a medical college, but the students turned out to be as embarrassed as Shanthi. Desperate, he decided to test his pads himself. To replicate menstrual bleeding, he tied an old soccer-ball bladder filled with goat blood around his hip, with a tube running from the bladder’s opening to his underpants. A friend who worked at a hospital supplied an anticoagulant. Every time he pressed the bladder as he walked and bicycled around the streets of Coimbatore, it squirted blood.
For all his trouble, the conclusions were limited. His pads did little to prevent the goat blood from wetting his underwear. Muruganantham did come away with a deep sense of sympathy for the women around him, however. “I realized how strong they are,” he told me. “Because if you try this, on the third day, you’ll get a fever and a cold. The wetness on the private parts is horrible.”
One day, while serving him lunch, Shanthi told Muruganantham she had heard a rumor that he was going around with girls at the medical college. She knew that he was on a quest to make inexpensive sanitary pads, but he had never told her about his other subjects. Thinking she wouldn’t understand his ambitions, he now lied. “I told her I had gone to the college to repair the main gate,” he says. She left home to visit her parents for a few days. Two weeks later, she told him she was never coming back. About two months after that, she sent him a divorce notice. “I knew that she was giving me shock treatment to make me drop the research,” he says. “But I had become addicted to it.”
SINCE THE 1980S, economic constraints have driven India’s government and industries to create cheaper versions of many Western products and technologies. India’s pharmaceutical companies have for many years been a major supplier of cheap generic drugs domestically as well as in other developing countries. In 2014, when the Indian Space Research Organization’s Mangalyaan spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars, a few days after a NASA probe did the same, the most-talked-about difference between the two missions was that Mangalyaan had cost about a 10th of what NASA had spent. As Indian scientists and engineers celebrated their ingenuity and reverse engineering, Prime Minister Narendra Modi noted that the 2013 film “Gravity” had cost more. The secret was I.S.R.O.’s decades-long experience in doing more with less through engineering focused on no-frills functionality. The Indian business conglomerate Tata has embraced that same philosophy: Its small four-seater car called the Nano starts at about $3,200 — less than many mountain bikes in the States. Since 2012, India has been producing the world’s cheapest tablet computer, the Aakash/UbiSlate. Its least-expensive version can now be purchased for $30.
Three decades ago, a researcher named Anil Gupta became one of the first academics to recognize that the everyday struggle for survival that ordinary Indians endured, especially in the rural villages, was a powerful driver of creativity and innovation. One weekend in March, I joined hundreds of visitors traipsing through an exhibition of innovations that Gupta and his colleagues at the National Innovation Foundation had helped organize on the idyllic grounds of Rashtrapati Bhavan, India’s presidential residence, in New Delhi. Gathered under a giant tent were tinkerers from rural and small-town India — farmers, metalworkers, students — showing off things they built to solve their problems. Many technologies on display were meant for agriculture: a motorcycle rigged as a tractor; a walnut-hulling machine; a motorized sifter to automate the painstaking task of removing impurities like tiny pebbles from rice grains; a tool to help men and women safely climb coconut and palm trees — a job traditionally performed by specialized tree climbers. All were low-cost answers to pressing needs.
Walking among the exhibits, I noticed a wash basin outfitted with sensors designed to automatically adjust its height to users. The device was designed by Akanksha Guha, a 14-year-old girl from Uttarakhand, in northern India, who came up with the idea after watching her father, who had a back injury, struggle to bend forward over the wash basin at home. “People who operate in a resource-constrained environment tend to seek the most efficient ways of solving a problem,” says Calestous Juma, a professor of development at Harvard Kennedy School. “For this reason, they rely on their creativity and resourcefulness more than those who have access to more assets. In such cases, innovation is an essential aspect of individual and community survival.”
Contrary to the ethic of “smarter-faster-better” that drives corporations to continually upgrade products (think of the growth of electronic features in gas ranges in recent years), the solutions developed by grass-roots inventors aim to be just good enough, simple in form and function, which keeps costs down. Gupta explained the concept to me using the example of the windmill-operated pump, developed by two farmers in the eastern state of Assam. “Windmills are well known, but what was new was the two questions they asked, which normally engineers wouldn’t ask,” Gupta said. “The first question was — does it matter whether we irrigate the paddy field in four hours or in 40? The answer was, it doesn’t. Second, does it matter whether the water comes smoothly or in spurts? Again, it doesn’t.” As a result, the device — simply a hand pump hooked up to a windmill — didn’t need to be equipped with a gearbox and could be built for less than $100.
Gupta told me he envisioned a future in which popular innovators would become partners with global corporations, modifying and adapting the technologies created in company labs to meet the unique needs of different constituencies. Such partnerships, in his view, would allow for the creation of products geared toward basic functionality, relieving the frugal-minded customer from the burden of paying for enhancements. He gave me the example of cellphones, pointing out that a majority of them included features that most of us never use. The ideal cellphone for his father would be one with just three buttons on it, programmed to call his three sons. “An 88-year-old person doesn’t want to talk to too many people,” he said. A group of engineering students in Rajkot had taken up the challenge of designing exactly such a phone, and he expected to be able to give one to his father later this year.
MURUGANANTHAM DETERMINED that the material in manufactured pads was an unusual kind of cotton. After calling various American manufacturers and navigating a maze of voice prompts — which he says cost him hundreds of rupees in charges — he finally found a few helpful company representatives, who were at first bewildered by his inquiry. “They asked me for the specifications of the machine I was using,” he says. Muruganantham told them he did not have any specs to offer and asked them to send a sample of the material produced in their multimillion-dollar plants.
What he got in the mail surprised him. Instead of a fluffy, cottonlike substance, the absorbent fabric looked like cardboard. It puzzled him for days until a dog he had adopted rummaged through the box holding the sample and scratched the board’s surface. Wherever the dog had scratched, soft tufts of fibers sprouted up. The board, it turned out, was compacted cellulose, derived from pine bark. Once broken up into a soft fibrous form, it was wrapped in a gauzelike cloth to produce a sanitary pad. That process was typically carried out in expensive, large-scale factories that could churn out thousands of pads in an hour.
Muruganantham spent the next four and a half years developing a cheaper alternative, turning his home into a workshop and laboratory. The villagers believed that he had become possessed by demons and needed an exorcism. “They wanted to chain me to a holy tree,” he said. Muruganantham had to move out of his house into a room he rented in downtown Coimbatore with five other tenants, doing roofing jobs in addition to his welding work for extra income. He found the trial and error of the research process thrilling. “I may fail today, but if I have another idea tomorrow, maybe it will work,” he told me. “This is what I enjoyed.” In the end, Muruganantham designed what was essentially a large meat grinder to break compacted cellulose into clouds of fibrous strands. “Seeing the board turn into fluff that filled up the whole jar was like magic,” he says. He made another device — a kind of drill press — to compress the fluffy material to the thickness of a pad.
In late 2004, Muruganantham made another trip to the medical college, only this time with a new kind of pad. Days later, when he went back to the campus to ask for feedback, he saw one of the women volunteers coming toward him, riding a scooter. She stopped and smiled. “When I use your napkin,” she said, “I forget that I’m having my period.” Muruganantham lit up. “That’s when I felt I had achieved what I had set out to do,” he told me. It had taken six years.
His creation won a local innovation contest and was covered in the press. After he was interviewed on television, Muruganantham got a call on his new mobile phone from Shanthi, his ex-wife. The two hadn’t spoken in years. She told him she was calling to congratulate him. “You need to see me on television to know who I am?” he asked. “Why were you not able to understand me earlier?”
“I left you so that you could pursue your goal,” Shanthi replied. The passage of time and the benefit of hindsight seemed to bestow her answer — not quite rooted in fact — with a semblance of truth. Before he hung up, Muruganantham asked her to buy a train ticket and return to him.
The potential market for Muruganantham’s invention was vast: Less than 10 percent of women in India were users of sanitary pads. But he wasn’t interested in simply selling a product. Nor was his method suited to high-volume production; it was the opposite of the automated assembly-line manufacturing of large corporations. Muruganantham saw a different possibility: helping locals in rural and urban communities make and distribute the pads themselves.
For a field trial of the concept, in 2005 he took his equipment to a remote district in Bihar, one of India’s least-developed states. But when he talked to local men about what he wanted to do, he came perilously close to being beaten up. He learned that he had to ask permission from fathers and husbands and brothers before pitching the idea to women. It took months, and numerous visits, to get local women to start making the pads as he’d envisioned, using machinery he produced.
Starting in 2006, Muruganantham made hundreds of trips to small towns and villages across India to promote his model. He didn’t need to persuade women to use his pads instead of rags. They already knew rags weren’t hygienic, especially if not properly washed and dried. Through the late 2000s, women’s cooperatives and rural nonprofits across India started setting up their own sanitary-pad manufacturing units using the machines Muruganantham made at his workshop. From small towns in Tamil Nadu and its neighboring states all the way to villages in the foothills of the Himalayas, pad-making centers run by women began spinning out their own versions, packaging them under local brand names like Nari Suraksha (“Women’s Protection”) and Sukhchain (“Peace of Mind”). Muruganantham hired more hands to help run his workshop and meet the increasing demand. Over the past decade, as other small entrepreneurs have begun selling the same kind of equipment, he says more than 2,100 of these production centers have sprung up around the country, selling pads for as low as 3 rupees. (Pads made by large companies cost on average 8 rupees and up, and are sold only in large packages.) The concept has recently spread to more than a dozen other developing countries, like Nigeria and Nepal, nearly all of the centers run by women.
AT A PRODUCTION center on the outskirts of Coimbatore housed in a yellow one-story building covered by a corrugated metal roof, I watched a group of women make Muruganantham’s pads. The manufacturing took place in an air-conditioned room that I had to take my shoes off before entering — a rule enforced by employees to keep the floors from getting dusty. First, a woman broke off a few pieces of compacted cellulose and put them in a grinder for two minutes. Next, she put about 10 grams of the resulting fluff into three rectangular compartments inside a metal frame. She placed the frame under a pneumatic press with three metal plates that came down, at the flick of a switch, to squish the fluffy cellulose into a half-inch-thick layer. Another worker carefully used a brush to glue a thin plastic film on the bottom of the three rectangles. A third woman wrapped each of them in a gauzy cloth, and then closed up the sides with a heat-sealing machine. The entire process took about 10 minutes.
The pads couldn’t have been more basic, and offered a stark contrast, in appearance and sophistication, to the winged, ultrathin, superabsorbent products sold by multinationals, not to mention the latest arrivals in feminine hygiene — the all-absorbing, no-hassle “period-proof underwear,” which sells for between $24 and $38 a pair.
The factory where Muruganantham fabricates his equipment is similarly low-tech, housed alongside similar units in an industrial compound off a dirt road just outside Coimbatore. We drove there past a crowded market within a hairbreadth of pedestrians and cows and flower sellers and carts ambling along the side of the road. Muruganantham parked his Jeep under a neem tree and led me inside. Men in flip-flops and vests were at work in sheds; some sat around, taking a break to smoke in between hammering and welding. We stepped into a warehouse crammed with machines, several of them encased in plastic wrapping, waiting to be shipped. His office was in a corner of the room — a desk and a few flimsy plastic chairs. “This is my headquarters,” he said with a laugh.
Muruganantham told me that he was approached by corporate manufacturers who wanted to partner with him to help get their higher-priced products into the rural market. He declined, he said, because he considered his model as central to making pads affordable and accessible. The women earning a livelihood by making and selling pads at local centers, he found, were also effective in promoting feminine hygiene within their communities. Using that model, he said, “we are going to make India into a 100 percent napkin-using country” — as opposed to the rags he remembered from his youth — “we are going to make Rwanda into a 100 percent napkin-using country, Zimbabwe into a 100 percent napkin-using country.” That goal sounds expansionist, but Muruganantham’s philosophy is not focused on growth. He told me he wanted to encourage “copycats” so that his pad-making technology could spread.
Muruganantham has done well for himself; he has a small team of employees and rents an apartment in a working-class neighborhood. When I asked if he wanted to improve his method so that pads could be produced more quickly, his answer was the opposite of what most chief executives might say. “My argument is that there is already an automated machine to make pads,” he said. “What I did — I reverse-engineered it to simple. Anyone who wants to compete will have to come out with a simpler machine.” Rather than increase efficiency, he said, he wanted to modify his innovation so that it could work without electricity.
The diffusion of Muruganantham’s innovation across parts of India and elsewhere has earned him global attention as an agent of social change. “Women’s ability to manage their periods with dignity through access to affordable or free products is a human right,” says Megan Mukuria, founder of the Nairobi-based ZanaAfrica Group, a company that makes and distributes low-cost pads. That’s why Mukuria and others see the movement to make sanitary pads accessible to all women as nothing short of a revolution. “In many parts of the world, girls miss classes because of the lack of sanitary pads,” Juma, the professor at Harvard, wrote to me in an email. “Some societies attach burdensome taboos to menstrual cycles that end up lowering the self-esteem of girls at a critical stage in their development.” Consequently, the distributed model for manufacturing pads, in Juma’s view, was “not just a health intervention” but a way to “liberate society from negative cultural attitudes.”
One afternoon, as we were driving to his house, Muruganantham joked about how his mother told everyone that if her son could do so well without an education, imagine what he could have done with one. “But I know that if I had got educated,” he said with a smile, “I might have ended up as a call-center employee.” Entering his home, I caught a glimpse of his 7-year-old daughter playing with one of her mother’s saris, putting it up over her head as if it were a tent, and Shanthi came out of the kitchen to greet us before returning to the sambar and rice she had on the stove. When I talked to her later that afternoon, she said that although her husband’s obsession had been the cause of their painful separation, she was glad he never gave up the quest. She had a vested interest. “I have seen the difference in quality since the early days,” she told me. “The pads now are very comfortable.”
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is the author of “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.”