Indian Innovators (17 page)

“I had decided to go for the program; so, I left the job one-and-a-half months after joining. The program was to begin in January 2011, and there were still a couple of months to go, just sufficient time for me to complete work on the final to-scale model.

I kept in touch with the German company throughout this period and even after landing in the US. I also hired an agent to represent me in Germany and work out the modalities.

Once in the US, I started approaching the US companies as well and attended various industrial expositions related to surgical devices.

By May 2011, a couple of American companies were also interested. Negotiations then began with all the interested parties and continued even after I came back to India.

The professors at Stanford helped a lot with drafting the agreement. Participants in the program who had prior experience in selling patents dispensed very useful advice on how much to disclose, when and to whom. Thus, the Stanford connection came in handy.

Finally, a deal was sealed in November 2011 with Intuitive Surgical Inc., a California-based, NASDAQ-listed MNC known for its robotic surgical systems.

It will take some time for the product to come into the market, as necessary clinical trials and FDA approvals are required for that.”

At Stanford, Chinmay worked on a device to prevent birth asphyxia, a medical condition in which a newborn does not receive enough oxygen before, during or just after birth. Birth asphyxia affects five out of 100 babies and can lead to disabilities or death, because the brain and other organs fail to receive enough oxygen. Each year, one million newborns die because of this condition. Timely medical intervention via a procedure called basic neo-natal resuscitation can save infants with birth asphyxia. The procedure involves pushing air into the newborn’s lungs through a tightly closed mouth by using special pumps. The process requires skill and expertise, because the air pressure should neither be too high nor too low. Such expertise is often not available in most Indian rural hospitals.

Chinmay was named among the top 35 Indian innovators by MIT Technology Review in 2013. He now works as a design consultant for some of the leading German and American medical devices companies. He has also incorporated a company in Pune by the name of Croleon Innovation Labs and is working on devices to help with robot- assisted and spinal surgeries. While he continues to carve out his niche in the high-precision medical devices industry, which is largely dominated by Western companies, he has not forgotten his social dues. As a gesture of giving back to his alma mater, Chinmay has sponsored an endowment fund at IIT Madras to support innovation. The endowment provides scholarships to students involved in innovation at the institute and enables them carry their work forward, thus ensuring that the country gets many more Chinmays.

Arunachalam Muruganantham

Low-Cost Sanitary Pad Making Machine

A study by AC Nielsen in 2010 revealed that of the 355 million menstruating women in India, only 12% used sanitary napkins. Moreover, in rural India, just 2% of menstruating women used sanitary napkins.

Unable to afford a napkin, women in poor households turn to cloth rags. Cotton rags used for the purpose are usually washed and reused, sometimes while they are yet to dry completely, which increases the likelihood of the rag being infested with bacteria. Some even poorer women, who may not have enough sarees to tear a few of them for rags, even use ash, husk, sand or a combination of these. This increases their risk of contracting bacterial, viral, worm and fungal infections in the reproductive tract, pelvic inflammation and even cervical cancer.

Menstruation in India has traditionally been associated with myths and taboos. It is never discussed openly and menstruating women are often barred from religious rituals. In fact, the subject is so hushed up that women find it difficult to talk about their menstrual problems to their husbands and even their mothers-in-law, forcing them to face these problems alone.

This is exactly what Arunachalam Muruganantham encountered when he got married. But unlike others, he resolved to find a solution.

Muruganantham was born in a village near Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. His father was a poor handloom weaver on the outskirts of the city that is known as the Manchester of South India for its cotton textile industry.

Muruganantham studied at a government school till Class X, after which he was forced to quit his education, because of his father’s untimely death in a road accident.

Initially, his mother made ends meet by selling her jewelry, household furniture and other valuables, but at last, Muruganantham was forced to leave school and find a job with a local welder. He did not know welding at that time; so, he was hired as an assistant for just
2 per day. Meanwhile, his mother also found work as farm labor for a measly
3 per day, and together, they somehow carved out an existence.

By his late teens, Muruganantham became adept at welding and even started copying his sister’s intricate
rangoli
designs for gates and window grills. At that time, most other welders would do only simple circular and rectangular patterns. Therefore, Muruganantham’s designs became an instant hit and people came from far-flung areas to buy his gates and window grills.

“One fine day, the shop-owner, who was a drunkard and pretty old by now, offered me a deal. I was among the finest workers around, worked hard and was now old enough to handle things on my own; so, he believed I could run the workshop. He asked me to buy the workshop from him and run it on my own, while he could retire and drink his last few days away.

He asked for
60,000 which I did not have. So, he arranged for a moneylender to lend me the money. From a shop-floor worker, I directly went on to become the owner.

Over the next several years, I worked extremely hard to be able to pay back the principal and the interest.

Finally, when the workshop was earning decent returns, marriage proposals started pouring in. In 1998, I tied the knot.

One day, I saw my wife carrying something behind her back. When I asked her what she was hiding from me, she said it was a trivial matter that did not concern me.

When I insisted, she revealed what she was carrying – a blood-smeared rag. I understood what it was and suggested that she use a sanitary napkin instead. She retorted that though she knew about sanitary pads, using them would mean the family forgoing some other more important commodity such as milk, because our budget would not allow for both.

I doubted that something as simple as a sanitary napkin could stretch our budget so much. So, I went to a provision store nearby and asked for a packet of sanitary napkins. The shopkeeper was surprised to see a male asking for sanitary napkins. When he found out that I was newly married, he was very amused that I would help my wife with ‘such issues’.

He wrapped the packet in a newspaper and handed it to me surreptitiously, as if it was contraband!

It was the first time I had held a sanitary napkin in my hand. It would have weighed less than 10 grams. The cost of 10 grams cotton was just 10 paise in those days; yet, the sanitary pad was about
3 per piece. I realized that lack of awareness was not the only reason for so many women in the village using husk, leaves or newspapers for the purpose. The cost was prohibitive for most daily-wage laborers.”

Muruganantham thought of making a sanitary napkin for his wife.

“I got the finest cotton from a local shopkeeper, cut it to size, flattened it, wrapped it into a rayon cloth and gave it to my wife.

The next day, I asked for her feedback, but she was visibly irritated by my insistence on the subject. She said I would have to wait until next month, that is, the next menstrual cycle.

When she used it, she was extremely unhappy with it. She felt that she was much better-off with the rag. Yet, she would not say what was so unsatisfactory about the sanitary pad.”

Every time he modified the napkin, he would have to wait for a month to get his wife’s feedback. When she did give feedback, it was only to say that she was not satisfied, without giving any reasons. Thus, he had no idea where he was going wrong. His inquisitiveness and impatience were growing, as was his wife’s anger at his ‘stupid and perverted attempt to enter a woman’s secret world.’

“I thought my sister would be more cooperative and open in sharing her opinion. So, I started pushing her to use my napkin as well. Unfortunately, she was even less forthcoming and barred me from entering her house, once she understood what I was up to.

After having failed with my family members, I turned to girls studying in a medical college. I thought they would be more open about the subject, as they were future doctors.

I contacted a few girls at the nearest medical college, which was 28 km away, and explained the situation. I would go to the medical college every month and give them the pads and ask for their opinion. To my surprise, even they were shy to talk about it.

In order to prevent embarrassing them, I started handing them a feedback sheet along with the pad. They had to answer the questions on the sheet with Yes/No responses and return the sheet to me.

One day, I saw a few of them filling out the responses on behalf of everyone. I knew this approach had also failed.

Something else was failing too – my marriage.

Small towns and villages are hotbeds of rumors. Everybody knows everybody else and people have little work except meddling in other’s lives.

The village was abuzz with the news that I was hanging around the medical college gates. My wife, baffled by my frequent trips to the medical college, started suspecting that I was seeing some girl there. She confronted me one day, but because she was unhappy with my napkin project, I could not mention it. She was so furious that she left our house and went back to her parents. I tried to reason with her, but to no avail. After a few days, I got a divorce notice.

Despite everything, I continued to experiment. Now, I started to ask the girls at medical college to return the used napkins. I was not expecting them to cooperate and had even planned to bribe the garbage collector to get me the napkins from the garbage. However, my persuasion worked, and thankfully, I did not have to go that length.

I used to keep the collected napkins in a bin in a locked room and analyze them on Sundays, when my mother had gone to the fields.

One day, she returned early and saw me working with a few stained napkins on the table, while the room stank of rotting napkins.

She thought I had either gone mad or some spirit had possessed me. She packed her bags and left too. I had to now fend for myself. I needed a lot of emotional support at that time. I was completely broken.”

Surprisingly, Muruganantham did not give up despite such strong opposition.

“It only strengthened my resolve further. I knew I had lost the trust of my wife and my mother; the only way to win it back was to complete the project successfully and prove that I was neither mad nor perverted. I knew that if I failed, I would not have failed just as an innovator, but also as a son and a husband. I had to win; there was no other way now.

I had lost so much, yet I had made little progress with the pads. In the absence of feedback from the girls, I decided to put on the sanitary napkin myself.

In order to replicate the uterus, I used a rubber bladder from a deflated soccer ball, filled it with goat’s blood and added anti-coagulants to it. I connected a tube from the bladder to the sanitary pad which was tied to my hips between my legs. I squeezed the bladder every 20 minutes as I went about my daily activities.

I used to get goat’s blood regularly from the butcher in the village, so rumors started that I was pursuing black magic. Some people even said that I was affected with sexually transmitted diseases.

Things came to such a pass that I decided to leave the village for good and move to Coimbatore.”

After moving to Coimbatore, Muruganantham started approaching labs to identify, analyze and compare the components of his pads with those manufactured by MNCs.

The tests revealed that the crucial difference between his pads and those of the multinationals was the fiber used. While he used a single type of cotton, commercially manufactured napkins used a combination of several types of cotton that was blended with cellulose derived from the pulp of the bark of pine trees. This provided better retention than pure cotton.