Recasting India

by Hindol Sengupta

  He wanted to ask more women for used sanitary pads for research, but it was getting more and more difficult. There was a whole bunch of villagers who came to the conclusion that Muruganantham practiced dark magic. Anything he asked of a woman would put her under a spell.

  Then he had to leave the village. His neighbors were threatening to chain him upside down to a tree to try and get the black magic out of him. It had been agreed by the villagers that unless Muruganantham could be cured, some dark spell would fall on the village. For a while, there was serious fear that he might be beaten up.

  “This was a really lonely period of my life. From certified depressed and ill, I got termed confirmed psycho and lunatic,” says Muruganantham. Then he adds, “The worst thing was that I had to cook for myself.” His jokes, often directed toward himself, are perfectly timed, giving the impression that he has long been using them to cover up the old insults.

  What Muruganantham was trying to understand was why some sanitary napkins are more successful than others. As far as he could see, most sanitary napkins were made of cotton, but then why were some more absorbent than others? All the laboratory analysis that he had attempted and commissioned on existing pads showed that the core ingredient was cotton. He knocked on the doors of many companies but got no replies until a professor at a local university agreed to help him reach out to some companies. After several phone calls, he finally reached people who asked him what sort of plant he had. “I know they didn’t mean a garden and plants in a garden! I of course had no plant, no factory, nothing—and no money to create any sort of factory.”

  Finally he was able to convince some people to send him samples of standard sanitary napkin material. It turned out that it was cellulose, which was broken down by complex machines and woven into pads with cotton. But he had no machine to do this—and no money to buy a machine. It took Muruganantham nearly five years, but he made his own contraption—a 147-part napkin-making machine that uses a grinder mechanism to break down cellulose and then packs it into rectangular shapes that are then wrapped into cloth and disinfected with an ultraviolet machine. It was a simple, easy-to-learn machine.

  “When we look at the problem of rural areas, we say that all these people cannot afford to buy the sanitary napkins that are available in the market. So we are going to make a product, a sanitary napkin, that is cheaper than what the big brands are selling but still does exactly the same job with the same level of cleanliness and hygiene—this is my first target,” says Muruganantham. “But then comes another equally important question—why are all these people not able to buy this simple product? Because they have no money. Just selling them something cheaper is not enough. What I make also has to create jobs and money in the community where it goes. That’s the only way this will be self-sustaining.”

  When his father, the handloom worker, died, Muruganantham’s mother worked in the fields as a laborer earning sometimes Rs 20, sometimes Rs 30 a day. He says that made him realize that opening job avenues for women was one way he could contribute. This is why, he says, he did not try to be a manufacturer of low-cost napkins and try to create a “bottom-of-the-pyramid” brand. Instead, he chose to focus on selling the machines themselves. In the meantime, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras entered his machine in a national innovation contest and, out of nearly 1,000 entries, his machine won—and got him an award from the president of India.

  This was the moment when he says he decided, resolutely, that he would sell not napkins but machines. In the first two years after the award, he built 250 machines, selling them across India to some of the remotest places. In each place he targeted, he looked at the issues women faced. In Uttar Pradesh, one of his target states since it has some of the worst health statistics for women, Anil Sengar of Srinagar village of Mahoba district told me that in 2013, his four units have sold more than one million napkins under the brand name Subah or “morning.” At Rs 18 per napkin, there is no dearth of buyers, said Sengar.

  “Women here have to fetch water, walk a lot, do a lot of household work, and using a proper napkin makes a big difference to health and sanitation,” says Sengar. “There used to be a lot of hesitation about this subject but increasingly people are willing to talk about it.”

  He says a lot of myths have been broken about napkins—including that they are not good for a virgin girl’s health. Buying from men also used to be a big issue, but that too is increasingly disappearing.

  Sengar differs with Muruganantham on one thing. The innovator tends to be a little wary about advertising created by foreign companies to sell sanitary napkins. He feels the focus is too much on style and food and not enough on the critical hygiene issue. “I cannot forget that dirty rag I had seen in my wife’s hand,” he says.

  But Sengar says he doesn’t believe fluffy advertisements are a problem. “If something is aspirational, then young girls will buy. Puberty age levels are falling from 13 or 14 years to 9 or 10 years, and the earlier girls know what their health needs are, the better.

  “What is wrong in them getting to know this through something that looks like fun and looks nice? At least that way they will be motivated to try it and that’s what we want.”

  Muruganantham’s wife is now back with him—as is his mother. And he is back in his village. The villagers have forgiven him and he is well known in the area. Muruganantham says his wife told him that she had no issue with his work when she left him but she could not take the insults of the neighbors.

  “This she told me after she returned. Now she is proud of what I do, and we have a daughter. So she knows that it is a matter of pride for our daughter too to have a father who thinks of the problems of women,” says Muruganantham.

  He and his wife have taken to gifting people who have girl children a set of napkins when the child is born. It is a small message—at least that’s how Muruganantham sees it: “Not enough is thought about the future of girls when they are born. My gift is a reminder for the parents to acknowledge and remember their daughter’s needs. I don’t know whether all of them will remember—but I can try.”

  Started in 2005, his workshop for the napkins is still small and has only 17 employees who get paid between Rs 15,000 and 30,000 per month. There are no designations. Everyone calls themselves “managers,” including Muruganantham. “I didn’t have designations for anyone because I didn’t really know much about this corporate thing. So if someone asks me what do I do in the company, I say I am a manager,” he laughs. The man who used to cycle wearing sanitary napkins now drives a car and earns, “depending on how good the year is,” between Rs 750,000 and one million rupees. He has given a TED lecture2—as the only man in the world who has worn a sanitary napkin—and has spoken at Harvard. He has presented his business model to a Unilever team in London.

  “I cannot believe that a school dropout like me, who taught himself how to speak English and speaks quite bad English, can be invited to speak at Harvard. That is amazing as far as I am concerned. I never believed in my wildest dreams that this would be possible,” says Muruganantham. “But then when I went to Harvard I heard lots of famous people dropped out from there too. So I thought, well, thank god I am not the only dropout.”

  Speaking at TED or at Harvard taught Muruganantham how to explain his vision. He says he was afraid that he would be instantly dismissed as a lightweight for having made a toy. But he learned to tap into the core of his idea. He was not even competing with the multinationals. He did not wish to fight P&G or Unilever. He was showing them the path to all those billions of customers who they were not able to tap.

  “The idea is that we are opening doors to worlds where they have not entered. We are doing the hard work of converting the customers and ensuring that they learn what this product is all about and how to use it. Unless we break the taboo, those billions of customers will never get introduced to the product,” says Muruganantham. That’s why he is spreading his business to other parts of the world. He says he realized that there
were poor people in every country and he was selling a necessity, not a luxury.

  “The biggest consumer goods companies in the world might try to price something cheaper and sell it to the poor but that is not their core focus—and they don’t think of generating employment. As the economic gap between rich and poor keeps growing, there will have to be new ways of thinking about products that can create employment and provide good quality goods,” says he. “We are never going to be able to compete with the biggest companies but the customer wants good products, not just brands.”

  His clients say that, more than money, it is the knowledge he has brought to their communities that is invaluable. Malik Saloni Anand, who set up a unit of six machines in Delhi, says that she paid only around Rs 275,000 for everything including delivery charges, and the machines can make between 200 and 300 sanitary napkins a day. Under the brand name Sakhee or “friend,” these are sold in the slums of Mangolpuri in Delhi for about Rs 20 per pad—or about half the price of a branded napkin.

  “There are hundreds of women who have learned how to use a pad and whose lives are safer, better because of this machine,” Anand told me. “One of the things about doing work with women is that it is not enough to tell them about hygiene issues, one must also provide the solution. Each client can choose whatever brand name they want for the product. Anand said that really helps because it can then be relevant and related to the local context. For instance, in a slum like Mangolpuri, the sense of comradeship between women makes Sakhee a perfect name.

  Muruganantham says his desire has always been to ensure that his clients can give a different look, feel and pitch to his core product. “In some places, the target group is school-going girls. In some other places, it is women who work the whole day in the fields and at home—can the pitch be the same? Of course not. As long as the purpose, which is health, comes out clearly and is explained to every customer, it does not matter what it is called.”

  The project today has a website and the company a name, Jayaashree Industries; on the website are videos of Muruganantham’s various talks. Spreading the word has become his passion. He says he travels most of the month telling people about health and his project. In villages and in remote areas, he is sometimes told that his work has made women free to live a little better, has helped girls stay in school, has helped women not be scared of their own bodies. He says that keeps him going. “I am not a woman. But trying to think like one has changed my life, and so I owe a debt to all women.”

  CHAPTER 9

  FACEBOOK FOR THE POOR AND THE VILLAGE CALL CENTER

  He used to be a BBC South Asia producer but left to live and work among the tribals of Central India. He has now beaten out Edward Snowden for one of the most prestigious information awards—the Google Digital Activism award of 2014, which is part of the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award.

  Shubhranshu Choudhary has created a network of information (and information gatherers and receivers) among some of the poorest Indians, what he calls a “Facebook for the poor,” with the potential to be “Google for the poor as soon as we incorporate ‘search.’ ” Every day between 300 and 500 people listen to prerecorded messages that carry information given by people just like them—all through a mobile phone—on his CGnet Swara network.1 The system is simple—anyone can give a missed call (dial the number and hang up before a response so that the calling number gets registered but without any charge to the caller) to a number +918050068000 (from outside India) or 08050068000 and immediately the call gets registered at the CGnet Swara call center, which then returns the call via an IVR (interactive voice response) system. The caller can now record their message for a duration of up to three minutes or listen to four previously recorded messages from other callers. CGnet Swara gives voice to the tribal population of Central India by providing them with a voice-based portal where they can report local issues using a landline or mobile phone. The content, once reported, is reviewed by moderators, and the submissions that fit the philosophy and goal of the organization (information for public good) are published for playback on the audio channel. At its heart, CGnet Swara is a voice-based news service.

  The idea is to create a citizen-driven, citizen-empowered news and information network that bypasses traditional media entirely and connects a network of consumer-creators. CG stands for Central Gondwana, whose name is derived from an old geological land mass, Gondwana, which consisted of Asia, Africa, and Australia. (In an unrelated coincidence, says Choudhary, the largest tribe of Central India are the Gonds, who are primarily concentrated in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.)

  Anywhere between 30 and 50 people call in and record messages, and make it, says Choudhary, the biggest “oral newspaper” for tribals in India. Tribals or people who trace their ancestry to indigenous tribes in India—a bit like the Native Americans—make up a little more than 8 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people.

  In recent years they have been at war with the Indian state led by Maoist guerillas fighting armed forces of the state including paratroopers. Essentially this is a guerrilla war that is being fought by tribal rebels led by commanders who belong to various Communist and quasi-Communist networks and parties against government paramilitary forces. According to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, nearly 8,500 people were killed in this war between 2003 and 2012.

  Choudhary, who grew up in Central India, says he decided to start CGnet Swara in 2003 while researching a book on the Maoist insurgency called Let’s Call Him Vasu: With the Maoists in Chhattisgarh. He met many young tribals, or “Adivasis,” as they are often called, who told him that the violence was largely due to “a communication gap.” This is a mild phrase for what is actually a deep and often absolutely bitter disconnect between the world of the Indian tribals and the rest of India, where tribal issues rarely if ever get noticed, unless the news is about tribal guerillas revolting against the state. The tribals of India have hardly any representation in mainstream media.

  “The war is a misunderstanding, and behind that misunderstanding is millions of people who just do not have a voice,” says Choudhary. “There are people who don’t want to be interpreted and re-interpreted by Delhi or Mumbai [Bombay], they want to tell their own stories, on their own terms.”

  One look at his website, cgnetswara.org, or the institution’s Facebook page gives a fascinating sense of how this happens. There are a series of messages that appear one after the other on the page.

  One says:

  Ramkailash Kol is telling us about a report he had recorded from village Babulaltola in gram panchayat Ghuman, tehsil [a district sub division] Jaba in Rewa district in Madhya Pradesh where 11 widows were not getting their social security pension. He says thanks to calls from friends in CGnet now 6 of them are getting their pension and for the rest the process is on and hopefully they will also get the same soon. I thank all of you who helped.

  Another reads:

  Jalandhar Singh Porte from village Ghabarra in Surajpur district in Chhattisgarh says they opposed proposed coal mine to Adani company in a public hearing on 20th March and since then local police is harassing them. Their village has got Community Forest rights and some of them had gone to Maharashtra to learn about it but police says we went for Naxal training. Pls call SP [the local superintendent of police] at 9479193900 to stop this harassment.

  There is a complaint:

  Dilip Behera is visiting Palsani village post Sablahar thana Jharban in Bargarh district of Odisha where villagers tell him that they have a primary school in the village till Class 5. But the school has only one room and all the students study together in that one room and are suffering. They have requested officials many times but there is no response. You are requested to call local officer at 8018882772.

  And a solution:

  Charan Singh Parte is calling from village Naogawan in Mawai block of Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh. He says I had called on Swara a month back saying there is no electricity in my vil
lage and had requested friends in CGnet to call the officials. I am glad to share that today I got a call from officials saying electricity for our village has been sanctioned and it will be installed soon. I thank all of you who called the officials.

  Each message has a name and a phone number attached to it. This serves several purposes. Local CG Swara volunteers in that area can check the veracity of the message. Also, the organization’s 12 full-time employees can call and verify the message, especially if it is a complaint. When the message is in a local tribal dialect, which it often is, a local associate of CGnet Swara in the area where the call came from can transcribe and translate the message and then check its accuracy.

  At the moment, the service is free for callers. The network gets two kinds of messages—one from citizen journalists, who have contributed to it in the past, and the other from those who are new to the system. Many citizen journalists who have contributed to CGnet Swara in the past have their messages immediately “filed” and available for hearing; for others, a process of verification, sometimes by a local citizen journalist, is followed. Also, if the complaint is about a government official, the complainant is asked to add the name and phone number of the person against whom the complaint is being made so that CGnet Swara employees can call and check on the situation from the perspective of the official. “We are building a network of reliable informants who can deliver real-time voice-based information,” says 44-year-old Choudhary.

  One look at the kind of messages CG Swara gets, and anyone who knows India and Indian media knows that these places, these names, almost never figure in the tales this country tells the world about itself, and the ones it repeats to itself. This is a different India speaking to itself and resolving its problems.