India's Tampon King

[SeeKer]

Really girls when a man takes it upon himself to find a cheaper way to provide sanitary products for women in poor communities, what are you to say?

 

.....In 2006, Muruganantham, a high school dropout, perfected a machine for making low-cost sanitary napkins against all odds. Along the way he'd taught himself English, recruited local college professors to help him draft letters and surf the web for suppliers,

worn panties (not to mention a sanitary pad and a football bladder full of blood),

and spent many times the cost of his TVS Motors moped on laboratory analyses. He even invented an alter ego to get past the gatekeepers at the U.S. firms that supplied the pine wood-based cellulose — not cotton — that he discovered was the raw material he needed...........

 

 

Eventually, he triumphed. Capable of producing around 120 pads per hour,

the machine Murugantham developed costs only about $2,500 — a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Procter & Gamble (P&G) spend on their plants

. And while output of 120 pads an hour hardly offers much in the way of economies of scale, Muruganantham's invention has created its own business model for small “self help groups” of low-income women — creating jobs that earn them twice what they made as ordinary laborers........

 

 

His napkin machines are already in place in more than 200 locations across India, where they are empowering local women, and taking the stigma away from menstruation and feminine hygiene by turning it into a lucrative trade. Though many have flourished, some self-help groups have floundered without management expertise — raising doubts whether a legion of grassroots organizations could truly handle the mammoth job of supplying sanitary napkins to the country. But Murugantham argues that if the government supports him instead of P&G or J&J, his machines cannot only solve India's feminine hygiene crisis but also provide employment for a million women......

Source

 

Hopefully the government will use one of their own inventions instead of partnering up with J&J for their free sanitary program

[Dhagax-Tuur]

That is ingenious. Local solution to a local problem.