How a school dropout helped women's lives

When Arunachalam Muruganantham spotted his wife gathering dirty rags in their home one day he asked her what they were for. If he was shocked by her reluctant response – that she was using them for her monthly period – he was even more taken back by her reply when he asked why she was not buying sanitary napkins in the shop. "If I buy sanitary napkins," she had told him. "It means I cannot afford to buy milk for the family."

The conversation spurred Mr Muruganantham into a frenzy of invention to produce an affordable napkin for women. Such was his dedication, bordering on obsession, that he once wore a football bladder of animal blood to trial a prototype. He was forced from his home by villagers who thought his methods had become too perverse after he started collecting used napkins from medical students. He was even abandoned – temporarily – by his wife and mother, who believed he had gone mad.

But 14 years later, the 49-year-old, who never finished school, has few regrets. Now dubbed the "Tampon King", his award-winning napkins are being produced on simple machines by groups across rural India and helping to revolutionise women's health. One workshop in India is operated in a shed in the Pardada Pardadi Inter-College, a forward-thinking girls' school run by an NGO in the town of Anupshahr, next to the Ganges river in Uttar Pradesh.

Here, Rama Devi, spends the first week of every month with six local women in the top-floor workshop, using simple hand-operated machines and following the five-step system that produces the sanitary napkins sold and distributed under the label Laadli, or "Beloved Daughter". While companies such as Procter & Gamble produce napkins that sell for up to 30 rupees (33p) a packet, these are sold for as little as 10 rupees.

The remainder of the month Ms Devi travels to villages, meeting young women, educating them about basic health issues and selling the products.

On a recent morning, i accompanied Ms Devi, a single mother with four daughters, and the family's sole earner, to the village of Dungra Jogi.

Shaded from the sun beneath a large archway, one of them, 25-year-old Umar Parthak, said of the napkins: "We feel a lot more freedom. It gives us a lot more freedom to go out. Also, the rags that we previously used were not hygienic." In some parts of rural India, as in many places in the developing world, the issue of women's menstruation is a matter still associated with taboo and discrimination. In some communities, women are still considered "unclean" during menstruation and are forbidden from entering the kitchen.

Professor Ritu Priya Mehrotra, of the social medicine department of Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, said women had traditionally used old cotton for menstrual hygiene. But a shift from cotton to synthetic saris meant many were now using man-made fibre, which was unhealthy and could not be sanitised in the same way. Previously women used sand or even mud. But Mr Muruganantham's product is not just a health boon for women, the production method also offers job and education opportunities. "I am trying to change the way the women think," Ms Devi said.

We feel a lot more freedom. It gives us a lot more freedom to go out... the rags we used were not hygienic