One man’s quest to build a better sanitary pad

Arunachalam Muruganantham has spent the last few years designing a better, and cheaper, sanitary pad for women in India. A fascinating report by BBC News details his journey, which began when he realized his wife used dirty rags instead of a proper pad. In fact, only 12 percent of women use sanitary pads in India and 23 percent of young girls drop out of school once they start menstruating. But in a country where the very subject is taboo, reverse engineering a sanitary pad proved a difficult task, with Muruganantham going so far as to fill a soccer ball with goat blood in order to test his prototypes. “I became the man who wore a sanitary pad,” he says. He eventually designed a machine so that rural women can make their own, and plans to expand the venture to developing countries all over the world.