Opinion Hygiene begins at home

Instead of being on a high,Muruganantham is crestfallen. A recent health ministry announcement says that the government intends to support women’s hygiene by launching an annual scheme where it would buy millions of rupees worth of sanitary napkins and sell them to poor and rural women at highly subsidised prices.

But in India the sanitary napkin market is controlled by Proctor & Gamble,Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark. Instead of subsidising multinationals and their products,priced at ten times or more than his product,Muruganantham wishes that the government would popularise his machine. “Women across India could access the low-cost hygiene products without draining scarce government resources,” he said.

Muruganantham’s invention churns 1000 sanitary napkins out daily,each costing a rupee. (In the shops,MNC products are Rs 100 for eight.) The machine itself costs Rs.1.25 lakh. (Muruganantham spent years researching and developing the machine. It was only after years of false starts that he realised that the padding used in the sanitary napkins shouldn’t be cotton but pinewood pulp.) Already,self-help women’s groups are operating 200 of these machines across India and reaping some tidy profits.

Affordability apart,in rural India where sanitation facilities for women are appalling,the napkin machine can bring about a quiet transformation.

A rural women’s group in Maharashtra’s Sholapur bought a machine under a World Bank water and sanitation project which is a great success; they sell the napkins at Rs. 2 each. “It has liberated poor rural women from unhygienic practices during their menstrual periods and improved girls’ attendance in neighbourhood schools,” says Mahadeo Jogband,a gender specialist in the government of Maharashtra’s water and sanitation department. The department now plans to buy more to install in every district.

Only 7 per cent of Indian women use sanitary napkins. In rural India,the usage is less than half that; most women use cloth rags and silently suffer discomfort and frequent infections. It is a market where women watch television commercials for hygiene products without even realising what the commercial is selling.

Muruganantham says he does not nurse any lofty ambition about displacing multinationals from India. He only hopes to step in to markets where women find their

sanitary products unaffordable. Enquiries are coming from Nepal and Bangladesh; some students from MIT are evaluating the machine and its products for the African market.

Still,he does not want to be a businessman,only the technology provider. Muruganantham hopes for a rural movement where rural women’s groups own and operate the machines and that would bring behavioural change,hygiene and employment to their doorstep.

“I would love to grab the potential business from a multinational and give it to poor,rural women,” he says. In India,more often than not,it is the other way around.

 saritha.rai@expressindia.com