What a classic Hero's Journey story- man encounters difficulty experienced by his loved one, tries to solve her problem efficiently, loses her in the process, becomes an outcast, persists, finds meaning in his work, receives help, is humble, helps people at an epic scale, reunites with his wife, happy ending, better world, triumph over ignorance and hardship.
Now it's creating employment for women within the villages and being sold for a lower price, while it previously was being mass produced by machinery and sold at a much higher profit margin.
You're right though, to the end consumer it's not that meaningful of a reduction, especially since it is an expense that is only incurred once a month.
Well and people are making them locally in their villages and colleges instead of buying international, and mostly women at that. I know American cities that are always struggling to keep mom and pop shops alive vs. the big boxes. Meanwhile everyone says Japan's only hope to keep their labor pool growing against their greying population is to start getting women involved. So he pulled off something America and Japan are struggling with.
> Meanwhile everyone says Japan's only hope to keep their labor pool growing against their greying population is to start getting women involved.
I was under the impression that as women join the workforce their fertility plummets. This seems incredibly counterproductive if the problem is a "greying population"?
I heard it was education that correlated negatively with fertility. Although education and careerism go hand in hand, I think the difference is still huge.
I wonder if that was 4 rupees in 1998, vs 2.5 rupees now? According to an online inflation calculator, 1 rupee in 1998 is worth 4 rupees now, so the difference would be more like 16:2.5.
Perhaps someone could check an online Indian Amazon equivalent, not that such a place would be available to rural women anyway, but it would give a lower baseline.
Plus reduction in medical problems and mortality and an increase in productivity.
I'm also not clear to what extent the mass-produced pads were actually available. He seems to have started out in a populated area with several villages and a significant town nearby. In more rural areas, was there even someplace you realistically could buy them?
Branded pads retail range Rupees 10-25 per pad - some variation in capacity. So the contemporary ratio ranges from 4:1 to 10:1. So 16:2.5 is good estimate even for contemporary comparison!
@pja you are hereby awarded 1 Fermi (see recent link on the topic of Fermi estimates).
The saving is significant because one can also buy shampoo in sachets that cost Rs.5, so the savings expand access to a range of basic hygiene products.
He is also increasing the local velocity of money. That 2.5 rupees is re-spent locally, aside from the cost of imported cellulose boards. 4 rupees spent on an import would exit, aside from the shopkeeper markup, and would not return, except as payment for exports.
The velocity of money effectively increases the availability of money. It isn't so much how many coins you have, but how often each one gets spent. If you buy from someone who hires and spends locally, that money is more likely to come back around to you faster than if you buy from someone who spends or saves it somewhere else. And that distance isn't just as the crow flies, but also psychological distance. Thus, as a software writer, I should prefer to buy from companies that spend a lot on software, even if they don't ever pay me directly. It makes more sense for me to shop at Amazon or Wal*Mart than somewhere that figures the sales excise with a desk calculator, and better for me to patronize such a business in my own town than one just like it 500 miles away.
So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, exactly. But trying to adjust the numbers to gauge the true economic impact of this invention would take about 3 more economists than I currently keep in my back pocket.
I understand the difference is considerably larger taking inflation into account (the first price was more than 10 years ago). But more than that, he's opening up sanitary pads to public discussion and reducing the taboo, which brings them to women who previously wouldn't have bought them at any price.
And of course he's also creating jobs for women and helping rural communities be more self-sufficient. There's so much more happening here than just discount products.
> He believes that big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas he prefers the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. "A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it," he says.
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
Perhaps, but the difference between butterflies and mosquitoes isn't really in damage to the food (virtually zero in both cases)... it's in the fact that butterflies perform a service (pollination) for the flowers. Mosquitoes quite literally live and die by the lightness of their touch; compare the survival rates of human-feeding mosquitoes (not 100%, but not far off) and human-feeding horseflies (0%).
"I would like to call your attention to a super piece of technology, the sailing ship. The sailing ship going through the sea is unlike a bulldozer. The sea closes behind the ship. The ship does no damage to the sea. The sailing ship employs the wind which is swirling ceaselessly around the earth without depleting any of the energy of the universe..." - Buckminster Fuller, from his piece in Alvin Toffler's book The Futurists.
This is an amazingly inspiring story, I love the entrepreneurial spirit and dedication of Mr Muruganantham.
However, there is a bigger story hiding behind this personal triumph. It's clear that people living in impoverished areas are not in a position to buy sanitary products at market rates (being sold at a margin of 4000% or more). But for example many do have access to cheap raw materials. It makes a ton of sense to simply make that stuff locally for a fraction of the cost, and with that comes a much greater independence for those poor regions. Let's hope that in time this becomes a trend that expands to many industries.
The article mentions that commercial napkins sold for 4 rupees despite cotton being 1/4000th the cost, but also says farther down that the locally produced ones sell for an average of 2.5 rupees each. That's a 38% discount: significant, but it doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me. I imagine that if this catches on, the larger manufacturers will likely just cut their margins to compete.
On a more general note, one of the big reasons for the Industrial Revolution's switch to mass-production was that making goods in huge factories is more efficient, and ultimately cheaper, than producing them locally in small quantities. Economies of scale are powerful.
A lot of companies dealing with products like these spend insane money on advertising, marketing and other mechanisms to sell their product. I think Pepsi can sell their drink at 1/10th price if they dropped the ads, sponsorships, marketing etc.
And not to mention. People themselves perceive cheaper products as that of low quality.
>> doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me
The big difference here is that there is women selling these in private to other women. No man behind a counter. When the women come together about this, it may end up not being such a taboo, and they get advise on how to actually do this. So the game changer here isn't the price, but the community and independence for the women evolving around this product.
This is exactly right. He has broken down a serious taboo already, as these women are now discussing these health issues among themselves. Even beyond that, they are taking it upon themselves to educate and empower other women and girls on these issues. Soon (if not already) the women will start talking about other issues in their community. Think about it: once you've talked about something as private and personal as a menstrual cycle, what other topics are really off-limits?
Also: never underestimate the power of convenience. These sanitary products make it much easier for women and girls to work, go to school, care for their children, and a whole host of other things. Things that make life easier for women have a way of catching on in communities.
and also it's less frightening for a young girl (say, 12 or 13) to purchase from an older woman than an older man. In straight marketing terms, it's great for creating rapport and point of reference.
Part of their cost is distribution. They have huge machines in central locations that can crank out millions of units, but there is no way they can compete with a machine on site that can already make enough to supply the whole village.
And they would have no choice but to sell them in a shop, which as the article mentioned, are predominantly run by men.
The inventor effectively cut off any chance for a multinational brand to enter this market, because he is selling the people their own manufacturing capital and distribution network, rather than trying to capture all the consumers for himself.
It would be like Microsoft trying to sell Windows 8 on an island where every inhabitant already uses the island's own distribution of Linux, and 10 people in every village contribute to it regularly.
I would think the decentralised approach would always be able to compete when we factor in transportation costs which usually make up a pretty significant percentage of the actual sales price with centralised mass production. Much more of the money stays in the local economies too.
> I would think the decentralised approach would always be able to compete when we factor in transportation costs which usually make up a pretty significant percentage of the actual sales price with centralised mass production.
For non-perishable goods they are actually much less than people generally think. For a benchmark, shipping t-shirts from Hong Kong to LA in bulk costs less than 5c each. The total transportation costs of a system is completely dominated by the last leg of the route, where things are shipped in the least quantity. Typically, if someone walks half a kilometer to pick a good from a store, the energy cost of that is more than all the transportation costs up to that point, regardless of where the good was made.
Given that, the centralized approach only needs to be a few percent more efficient than the decentralized one to completely bury it. That is usually achievable.
This is true if companies are allowed to externalize costs. Down the line, however, someone's gotta pay the externalities. Usually the future generation. One can delay this, but it will catchup eventually. One manifestation is borrowing assets from an unrealizable future.
This is not to say local loops are externality free, but I conjecture they are more information-efficient and likely to get corrected quicker.
I think looking at the supply-side is the wrong approach. There's probably some factory in China churning out pads for half the cost, absorbing more of the transport cost.
The real genius here is the local factor. We're talking Mary Kay ladies selling sanitary pads. The power of local communities to change behavior and move product is incredible, especially in places where people actually talk to each other. Americans learn about paper towels from TV. If you can't afford a TV, you're talking to people more, and that's a more more valuable channel to engage folks.
End of the day, the product is cheap enough, but there is a powerful incentive to sell, and that's the real magic.
Also, as someone researched below, the price now is between 10-25 R. But as someone else said, I think the involvement of the women in production and distribution is the real game changer.
I also liked his quote that no person dies of poverty, but from ignorance.
38% discount + 10 new jobs per machine. And each additional woman who can now afford to use them, is one more woman who is now more likely to be able to hold down a job or complete school.
I also don't think it's as simple as cutting margins. Note how much of the issue is/was down to social taboos and people being embarrassed about even things like buying them from men in the local shops.
Eventually, sure - as it says in the article he does not see himself as competing with the big manufacturers, but as opening up new markets for them. But if they make inroads it will not not be a bad thing.
My gut feeling is the ripple effects in the local economy is huge. Never mind that this product could probably be produced with less effort at a centralized location - initiatives like these work by both providing a slightly cheaper product and enabling poor people to participate in secondary or tertiary industries.
So in a sense this is an education project on multiple fronts as well. Not just about hygiene and taboos, but also about economics. It's a brilliant illustration that increases in wealth, even from a modest starting point, have large effect. It would be really cool to see this phenomenon studied closer.
World poverty is really just like the Great Depression on a global scale: Lots of quite healthy and able humans which are for some reason (economics, lack of education, lack of communication) unable to participate in global wealth creation. Anything that helps alleviate this problem is a big bonus for humanity.
Never mind that this product could probably be produced with less effort at a centralized location
Transport is a significant cost, even in countries with loads of freeways and autobahns. In the rural areas where these machines are being placed, I imagine the transport infrastructure is particularly poor.
4 rupee price was before, when he first went to buy them. Years passed, and India has crazy amounts of inflation, and now it costs 2.5 rupees. I think if calculated, he probably made somewhat of a 70+% discount or more.
The cotton was 1/40th of the cost: "10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price"
One of the biggest problems with this forum is very narrow minded view of things looking through a limited binoculars of a capitalist culture when everything has to boil down to profit in pure money terms.
What this guy is achieving is more than bringing down the price.
The job he is creating for these women is providing incalculable benefit to themselves, their families, their children and is adding more to the society (which operates on a completely different value system than your own) that can not be calculated in 20 pause less per pad.
Also, you mentioned the scale of economy, but didn't see that he achieved this price reduction without mass scale production which in itself is a big achievement.
Without going in much details, I'd say the capitalist approach does not always benefit the society. I know everybody here is a superstar techie working on the next big social success to allow people do more fluff, other people in other worlds may have different priorities.
What are the cost of the material + the proportional part of the 10 salaries + other costs?
>* He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price.*
This is the first estimation of the material cost. Then he learned that they use cellulose. And I don't know if it considers the cost of the surrounding cloth or the plastic wrap. Just assume this is accurate and pick a material cost of 0.10 rupees/pad.
> [...] and provides employment for 10 women. They can produce 200-250 pads a day [...]
Assuming a 20 days/month work, we get 500 pads/month/worker. The minimum salary is slightly bigger than ~100 rupees, let's say 0.02 rupees/pad
I don't know the details in India, but tax and retirement founds and security health may add a 50%, that is 0.01 rupees/pad.
> A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (£723) - a semi-automated machine costs more.
To recover machine the cost in 5 years, with 60000 pads/year, the result is 0.25 rupees/pad.
> First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine.
Well, I don't know the cost of cellulose. Just assume that it's a good approximation to consider the cost of an equivalent amount of cotton instead, as in the first paragraph. [ * ]
Another cost source is the gas to cook the cellulose and the electricity for the light in the building and the building maintenance cost and ... I don't know how to do a good estimation of them, so just forget them.
And don't forget to add taxes.
Then my optimistic cost is 0.38 ruppes/pad and they sell them for 2.5 rupees, so it's a x6.6 margin, instead of a x25 margin.
[ * ] If I'm free to invent numbers, I'd like to double the material cost from 0.1 to 0.2 rupees/pad to consider the changes in the material. Then the total estimation is 0.48 ruppes/pad and the margin reduced to x5.2.
> That's a 38% discount: significant, but it doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me.
That's because it doesn't take into consideration the biggest cost into consideration - the cost of human capital. A larger manufacturer cannot cut down the costs drastically, as the human capital at bigger companies is much larger than a small scale business.
The 2.5 stayed local and made jobs. Its a huge difference. In essence, he gave the locals "permission" to produce these things for themselves.
Wealth disparity is an interesting animal. The rich don't consume 1000's of times more resources than the poor despite having 1000's of times more 'money'. The wealth divide seems to function like an insidious form control wherein the uber-rich are able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves.
Its great to see when guys like this realize its all just made of paper (literally and figuratively in this case) and they can actually just do it for themselves.
As demonstrated by this article, the uber-rich are not able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves. The uber-rich simply failed to figure out how to market pads themselves. If Ambani had figured out the marketing, this would just be another story of Reliance incrementally moving into another industry and making a bunch of money.
Trying to paint the uber-rich as some sort of villain here is silly.
The really interesting thing is that this is an example of the value of marketing.
Yeah, it doesn't sound quite right yet to me either. There's no overt mustache-twirling villainy going on here. Its more like a emergent artifact of the system.
Its just interesting to observe a depressed area where everyone is in want, but no one has a "job" to do. The baker can't deliver bread because his truck is broken and then mechanic has no bread so he can't work on trucks. Why? Because neither of them has any "money". Therein is the problem.
The 2.5 was also subject to inflation (we're talking ~15 years, in a developing nation; that's a lot of inflation). In real terms, it's a huge discount - far in excess of the benefits of keeping some fraction of that for the local economy.
In the meantime, I don't believe the wealthy are exercising a substantial form of control here.
Background: India was without effective sanitary pads for most of human history. Recently, in the past few hundred years or so, some people became fantastically wealthy. At some point, several sanitary pad manufacturers were set up that sold their products, mostly in developed nations and not rural India.
Are you saying wealthy people stopped the people of India from manufacturing their own sanitary pads before this guy came around to the scene? They certainly didn't stop these people after he came around. It looks to me more like there just wasn't anyone who bothered to bring the sanitary-pad manufacturing technology there yet: the wealthy who were interested in the pursuit of money were pursuing easier or more profitable opportunities, and the wealthy interested in making a difference in the world (including those who would just give money away) were unaware of this need.
There are plenty of things that plenty of wealthy people/businesses can/actually do that keep the little man down in plenty of situations. This just... doesn't look like one of them. Poverty is the natural state of Man.
It is a giant ponzi scheme, what are you gonna do :|. One of the most expensive things one can own is a house, but the house of a poor person is many times cheaper than the house of a rich person. Add the race to have a bigger house and you have got inflation - just when you start to earn 1000 times more you need to pay 2000 times more if you want to live with people of same status.
Some economies of scale are attainable with small numbers of (or single) craftsmen. If you can batch operations, one person can rotate though steps of a process over the course of a day, or of days.
Another factor in the Industrial Revolution was the addition of both energy and capital. Where early energy sources were often inconveniently located: mill towns were, literally, located on waterways or elsewhere free energy was possible, often quite distant (and over very poor roads) from major populations, which is to say, either labor or markets.
The revolutions of steam and electricity meant that the scale of operations of factories could be both scaled up and down: smaller-scale equipment means that a local shop can produce goods, though typically this means on a highly specialized basis.
Other factors tend to increase cost of goods: advertising, marketing, and competitive fencing via exclusive marketing arrangements, patent enforcement, and the like.
Very True. There is one point the article missed. Many women now barter sanitary pads instead of paying with money. For example, in some rural areas, women exchange sanitary pads for vegetables from the farmer. IMHO that's amazing and something multinationals cannot do.
Actually, they say so, and mention onion. I think it’s part of the overall decentralised approach that the article mentions, showing brands, but doesn’t entirely cover: price, product bundle, marketing efforts all appear to be locally decided.
> It's clear that people living in impoverished areas are not in a position to buy sanitary products at market rates
A study in 2011 said that 70% couldn't afford sanitary napkins [0]. Until 2011 or so, sanitary napkins attracted a 14% luxury tax [1]. They were now reduced to 1%, only after pressure from NGOs.
Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia identified this a long time ago. His ideal would be that their products are manufactured for the local market (or manufactured locally). However since they also strive to create a sustainable supply chain, and this requires control, it is not currently possible.
I wonder if 'letting go' of the supply chain - regardless of the repercussions - would allow these methods to evolve...
Similar problem was in communist Czechoslovakia. There was only one factory making hygiene products for entire country, but it burned down on second year of 5 year plan. Central planning committee could not be arsed to change the plan...
While pursuing his entrepreneurial dream, he walked around asking women for their used sanitary pads (while most men struggle to ask for a date), almost gets tied to a tree when a witch doctor incites the local villagers against him, has his wife leave him (only to come back after his success), and even his mother abandoned him; still he goes on.
And then, even after having practically everyone around him ostracize and abandon him, he doesn't go for the money, but remains humble and does the best he can to make the world a better place.
she did not return because of his success, she returned because he was no longer bringing shame upon his family. As the article mentions, there many taboos in their society, there is the caste system that provides separation (even tint of skin can) and of course separation of sexes. So his single minded pursuit made life untenable for her where they lived, it even drove off his own mother. You did note that she merely went back to her mom, she didn't run off with another man. Essentially, she was waiting till he either gave up the pursuit or succeeded, I am quite sure they would be together regardless.
Hell there is odd separation in the states amongst some of the workers from that country. You can see it in the groupings, who has lunch together, those who walk apart or turn down a hall when meeting
That’s how I understood it, possibly like some ‘Chicanos’ in the US tend to have darker skin than ‘White folks’, but not all actually have; is that wrong?
No. I am saying there are many levels of separation of society in India, very similar to how separation exists in other cultures. However many Western nations prefer to highlight those faults in other countries and disclaim any such in their own.
Contrast this grass roots effort with OLPC, a grandiose plan to distribute One Laptop per Child to the third world. The best quip I ever read about that was: "OLPC is a rich man's idea of what poor men need. It's like donating an expresso machine to a homeless shelter."
Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water. This one humble guy has done more good for more people in India than 1000 grandiose schemes such as OLPC. And he wants to expand to 106 countries. I wish him well.
Also, does your quipper think that women aren't important? I always find it amusing when people wax philosophical about equality whilst retreating into sexist terminology to do so. Instead of 'poor men', 'the poor' or 'poor people' works to the same effect.
I'm aware of all that. I didn't say boo to 'rich man', because it is driven by Negroponte. I recognized the literary device with 'wax philosophical'. It's still someone trying to play the oneupmanship game on equality while at the same time perpetuating sexism. It's a shitty thing to do to merely 'sound cool' - selling out ideals for demagoguery.
English is a wonderfully flexible language and there are a dozen different ways to say the same thing here. Hand-waving away the hypocrisy in that statement as being a more powerful (barely, at that) literary device is just being lazy.
I'd also counter that the proper literary device is 'rich man/poor mAn', not 'rich man/poor mEn'. A small but meaningful difference.
> Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water.
Not that tired old argument again. Yes, it is true. But lots also do. And lots have cellular broadband, and tons of relatively poor people have access to smartphones. Not all of the third world is the same.
And looking at the OLPC site now, they're up to 2.4 million of the thing. Not quite the numbers they'd hoped for, perhaps, but still 2.4 million children in developing countries who now have access to computing.
There's room for projects trying to address more than one issue, for more than one group of people.
The OLPC wasn't about getting luxury electronics in the hands of the poor, it was about getting them free self-directed education. It was an attempt to leapfrog all of them fundamental problems of poverty by empowering people to do things for themselves.
As an Indian, I can see what pain this guy went through. Fighting the society to build a start up like this, with this kind of taboo attached to the product? All the best trying to build a start up at the first place. You are almost treated like you are doing it because you absolutely are incapable of doing anything else.
And having the gumption to fight years of laughter, isolation, mockery and ridicule to only chase what you believe in is a very different thing than just building a company. You are fighting forces that you would do anything to see you fail. And this is beyond the merit of your product.
I salute this guy for not just what he has achieved. Though the margins he achieved will be eventually matched by bigger companies.
In many ways this is like the first man climbing the Everest or first space agency going to the moon. Others have been there after the first attempt. But the people who do it first, face significant obstacles. And they inspire all of us.
I don't know that the bigger companies will achieve the success. This guy's brilliance is in grasping the same economic reality that exists behind open source software, namely that the wider dispersed ownership of the tools one uses to produce things are, the easier it is to achieve long-term success.
I also appreciate this man's efforts. But I slightly disagree with your view point. He never tried to build a startup, he just tried to solve a problem in our society. All these news about businesses and startups corrupted our mind, aren't they?
There's a lot to this article. See how the distributed form of production really works, and these sanitary pad machines really aren't that different from open source software. See how they change the world and again, the distributed ownership and small business approach does it.
And additionally, why it is never a good idea to underestimate someone because of a lack of formal education.
"He fashioned a sanitary pad out of cotton and gave it to Shanthi, demanding immediate feedback. She said he'd have to wait for some time - only then did he realise that periods were monthly. 'I can't wait a month for each feedback, it'll take two decades!'"
Sounds like he got a pretty solid biology lesson along the way.
Or you just get menstruation cups? Might be a bit more expensive initially but cheaper longterm and a lot more environmentally friendly. http://www.ruby-cup.com/en/
I know two women who have tried those. In both cases they tried for several months to get used to them, but they gave up eventually because they're so unpleasant to use, and it never gets any easier. Apparently.
Using one myself and best thing I've ever tried! Takes some practice but once you got the hang of it it works great. But think it's different from woman to woman!
There are women who find that menstrual cups aren't for them, but in my experience, they tend to be the exception. Using one myself, and having turned many of my friends onto them, they're generally hailed as the greatest thing ever invented around here. Not to say theres anything wrong with your friends, because everyone likes what they likes, just wanted to throw my own experience.
I feel like most of the university-educated young women I know use Diva Cups or Keepers (and many don't mind talking about them and promoting them to others or I wouldn't know that). I think their usage really depends on local culture, social norms, propensity to shop in organic grocery stores where they are often sold, etc.. The first women I knew who used them started in the early nineties.
Cups seem a lot more expensive, you can buy almost 700 sanitary pads for the retail price of 1 ruby cup ($28 ~ 1735 rupees). Also, the pads are more available and create jobs for women in rural areas because they are produced and sold locally.
As a loud supporter for menstrual cups, and someone who is admittedly not that familiar with Indian culture, I can see there being a large cultural barrier towards adoption of menstrual cups, as they require you to get, well, a little up close and personal with your own body. Even in the US, I know a few people that are completely uncomfortable with the idea and won't use menstrual cups or tampons without applicators (or tampons at all).
If the subject is so shameful and taboo that the women mentioned in this article can't even dry their sanitary rags in the sun, do you really see them boiling a menstrual cup in the family's cooking pot once a month to sterilize it?
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
I'm so glad this made it to HN. From an Indian societal perspective, what he achieved is just marvellous and outstanding! It takes tremendous courage and determination to do something like this in India! Salute to this man!
I really enjoyed this story and remember first hearing about him a few years ago. Truly inspiring man.
It makes me wonder, how many other people are out there who have the same passion for something, but haven't had any success? Only a select few will have success, most will fail. I think we should celebrate the people who took risks and failed too. But sadly you won't find articles written about them as it isn't a happy ending like this one.
I'd also imagine regular washing such rags in overcrowded areas with an absence of infrastructure can cause issues - as would it be in places where people (mainly women) need to spend a significant amount of the day just to get hold of water.
Why use washable rags when you can use a diva cup?
I suspect the answer is the same in both cases: lack of clean water and effective sterilization methods. If you wash your rags in dirty water and do not expose them to the sterilizing UV rays of direct sunlight, you're giving yourself infections. The machine uses a UV light to sterlize, and does not require a reliable water supply.
When every village in India has access to ample amounts of clean-from-the-tap water, they may choose to revisit their current solution.
So the trick is: lie to existing manufacturers to get the schematics, build simplified/more manual machines, use really cheap labors, and probably lower the profit margin? Reminds me of knockoff products but then it's probably a phase that developing countries go through.
I believe TED is not about presenting tech as a "savior."
I believe TED is a sandbox for a number of powerful people to work out their interpersonal arguments about whether tech is good for the world or not. As such you will hear all presentations subtly presented in this light without the participants (presenters nor audience members) being aware. It's essentially a gladiatorial arena funded by the well-to-do, cleverly disguised as another "gee whiz" tech conference.
As such, stories and material are distorted toward arguing the spectral ends of the conference creators.
This is why there are so many stories presented that "make tech look silly, bad or overextended." They're placements by forces within the internal TED conflict that are trying to diminish public opinion about the benefits of technological practice.
Make no mistake- these people are happy to see TED come off as foolish or ruinous, b/c it supports their contingent's goals. They have founded TED with the intention of presenting foolish ideas to tarnish the concept of technology as a practice.
So, the age old advice applies here - take everything with a grain of salt. When you hear a presentation, get what you can out of it, realize it's not the full picture and seek out the missing pieces. Do not rely on TED for a coherent or complete picture of anything. It's just an artifact of debating idealogues.
What is with this ridiculous knee-jerk reaction against anything TED? If that video had been exactly the same except for the TED name, you would've been fine with it. But you've decided TED must be bad, and therefore anything connected with TED is also bad. Lose the silly bias and let good things be good things.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadhttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi
One man's epic struggle against the landscape, to not let others suffer as he did.
You're right though, to the end consumer it's not that meaningful of a reduction, especially since it is an expense that is only incurred once a month.
For a longer answer you may want to consider the personal and social hurdles he had to overcome and that not all gains are measured in money.
Community wide DIY. So yes it makes sense.
I was under the impression that as women join the workforce their fertility plummets. This seems incredibly counterproductive if the problem is a "greying population"?
Perhaps someone could check an online Indian Amazon equivalent, not that such a place would be available to rural women anyway, but it would give a lower baseline.
I'm also not clear to what extent the mass-produced pads were actually available. He seems to have started out in a populated area with several villages and a significant town nearby. In more rural areas, was there even someplace you realistically could buy them?
@pja you are hereby awarded 1 Fermi (see recent link on the topic of Fermi estimates).
The saving is significant because one can also buy shampoo in sachets that cost Rs.5, so the savings expand access to a range of basic hygiene products.
I shall wear it with pride!
The velocity of money effectively increases the availability of money. It isn't so much how many coins you have, but how often each one gets spent. If you buy from someone who hires and spends locally, that money is more likely to come back around to you faster than if you buy from someone who spends or saves it somewhere else. And that distance isn't just as the crow flies, but also psychological distance. Thus, as a software writer, I should prefer to buy from companies that spend a lot on software, even if they don't ever pay me directly. It makes more sense for me to shop at Amazon or Wal*Mart than somewhere that figures the sales excise with a desk calculator, and better for me to patronize such a business in my own town than one just like it 500 miles away.
So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, exactly. But trying to adjust the numbers to gauge the true economic impact of this invention would take about 3 more economists than I currently keep in my back pocket.
And of course he's also creating jobs for women and helping rural communities be more self-sufficient. There's so much more happening here than just discount products.
What a profound and inspiring worldview.
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
"I've accumulated no money but I accumulate a lot of happiness."
-Arunachalam Muruganantham
From 'Enter the Dragon': a quote from the great Master Lee himself!
"I would like to call your attention to a super piece of technology, the sailing ship. The sailing ship going through the sea is unlike a bulldozer. The sea closes behind the ship. The ship does no damage to the sea. The sailing ship employs the wind which is swirling ceaselessly around the earth without depleting any of the energy of the universe..." - Buckminster Fuller, from his piece in Alvin Toffler's book The Futurists.
You think so? If all those "mosquitos" decided to stop pestering you, you'd probably revise your analysis.
However, there is a bigger story hiding behind this personal triumph. It's clear that people living in impoverished areas are not in a position to buy sanitary products at market rates (being sold at a margin of 4000% or more). But for example many do have access to cheap raw materials. It makes a ton of sense to simply make that stuff locally for a fraction of the cost, and with that comes a much greater independence for those poor regions. Let's hope that in time this becomes a trend that expands to many industries.
On a more general note, one of the big reasons for the Industrial Revolution's switch to mass-production was that making goods in huge factories is more efficient, and ultimately cheaper, than producing them locally in small quantities. Economies of scale are powerful.
A lot of companies dealing with products like these spend insane money on advertising, marketing and other mechanisms to sell their product. I think Pepsi can sell their drink at 1/10th price if they dropped the ads, sponsorships, marketing etc.
And not to mention. People themselves perceive cheaper products as that of low quality.
The big difference here is that there is women selling these in private to other women. No man behind a counter. When the women come together about this, it may end up not being such a taboo, and they get advise on how to actually do this. So the game changer here isn't the price, but the community and independence for the women evolving around this product.
Also: never underestimate the power of convenience. These sanitary products make it much easier for women and girls to work, go to school, care for their children, and a whole host of other things. Things that make life easier for women have a way of catching on in communities.
and also it's less frightening for a young girl (say, 12 or 13) to purchase from an older woman than an older man. In straight marketing terms, it's great for creating rapport and point of reference.
That'll will never happen because these village women have never been their customers.
And they would have no choice but to sell them in a shop, which as the article mentioned, are predominantly run by men.
The inventor effectively cut off any chance for a multinational brand to enter this market, because he is selling the people their own manufacturing capital and distribution network, rather than trying to capture all the consumers for himself.
It would be like Microsoft trying to sell Windows 8 on an island where every inhabitant already uses the island's own distribution of Linux, and 10 people in every village contribute to it regularly.
http://www.mapsofindia.com/top-ten/india-crops/cotton.html
Even if this particular business model would "only" work in India it'd be a success.
I'm still in total awe, Mr. Muruganantham is a true hacker.
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1
For non-perishable goods they are actually much less than people generally think. For a benchmark, shipping t-shirts from Hong Kong to LA in bulk costs less than 5c each. The total transportation costs of a system is completely dominated by the last leg of the route, where things are shipped in the least quantity. Typically, if someone walks half a kilometer to pick a good from a store, the energy cost of that is more than all the transportation costs up to that point, regardless of where the good was made.
Given that, the centralized approach only needs to be a few percent more efficient than the decentralized one to completely bury it. That is usually achievable.
This is not to say local loops are externality free, but I conjecture they are more information-efficient and likely to get corrected quicker.
The real genius here is the local factor. We're talking Mary Kay ladies selling sanitary pads. The power of local communities to change behavior and move product is incredible, especially in places where people actually talk to each other. Americans learn about paper towels from TV. If you can't afford a TV, you're talking to people more, and that's a more more valuable channel to engage folks.
End of the day, the product is cheap enough, but there is a powerful incentive to sell, and that's the real magic.
I also liked his quote that no person dies of poverty, but from ignorance.
I also don't think it's as simple as cutting margins. Note how much of the issue is/was down to social taboos and people being embarrassed about even things like buying them from men in the local shops.
Eventually, sure - as it says in the article he does not see himself as competing with the big manufacturers, but as opening up new markets for them. But if they make inroads it will not not be a bad thing.
So in a sense this is an education project on multiple fronts as well. Not just about hygiene and taboos, but also about economics. It's a brilliant illustration that increases in wealth, even from a modest starting point, have large effect. It would be really cool to see this phenomenon studied closer.
World poverty is really just like the Great Depression on a global scale: Lots of quite healthy and able humans which are for some reason (economics, lack of education, lack of communication) unable to participate in global wealth creation. Anything that helps alleviate this problem is a big bonus for humanity.
Transport is a significant cost, even in countries with loads of freeways and autobahns. In the rural areas where these machines are being placed, I imagine the transport infrastructure is particularly poor.
What this guy is achieving is more than bringing down the price.
The job he is creating for these women is providing incalculable benefit to themselves, their families, their children and is adding more to the society (which operates on a completely different value system than your own) that can not be calculated in 20 pause less per pad.
Also, you mentioned the scale of economy, but didn't see that he achieved this price reduction without mass scale production which in itself is a big achievement.
Without going in much details, I'd say the capitalist approach does not always benefit the society. I know everybody here is a superstar techie working on the next big social success to allow people do more fluff, other people in other worlds may have different priorities.
1: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-reje...
>* He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price.*
This is the first estimation of the material cost. Then he learned that they use cellulose. And I don't know if it considers the cost of the surrounding cloth or the plastic wrap. Just assume this is accurate and pick a material cost of 0.10 rupees/pad.
> [...] and provides employment for 10 women. They can produce 200-250 pads a day [...]
Assuming a 20 days/month work, we get 500 pads/month/worker. The minimum salary is slightly bigger than ~100 rupees, let's say 0.02 rupees/pad
I don't know the details in India, but tax and retirement founds and security health may add a 50%, that is 0.01 rupees/pad.
> A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (£723) - a semi-automated machine costs more.
To recover machine the cost in 5 years, with 60000 pads/year, the result is 0.25 rupees/pad.
> First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine.
Well, I don't know the cost of cellulose. Just assume that it's a good approximation to consider the cost of an equivalent amount of cotton instead, as in the first paragraph. [ * ]
Another cost source is the gas to cook the cellulose and the electricity for the light in the building and the building maintenance cost and ... I don't know how to do a good estimation of them, so just forget them.
And don't forget to add taxes.
Then my optimistic cost is 0.38 ruppes/pad and they sell them for 2.5 rupees, so it's a x6.6 margin, instead of a x25 margin.
[ * ] If I'm free to invent numbers, I'd like to double the material cost from 0.1 to 0.2 rupees/pad to consider the changes in the material. Then the total estimation is 0.48 ruppes/pad and the margin reduced to x5.2.
Their website says that the raw materials for 8 pads are 7.15 rupees.
So that's about .9 rupees/pad.
That's because it doesn't take into consideration the biggest cost into consideration - the cost of human capital. A larger manufacturer cannot cut down the costs drastically, as the human capital at bigger companies is much larger than a small scale business.
Wealth disparity is an interesting animal. The rich don't consume 1000's of times more resources than the poor despite having 1000's of times more 'money'. The wealth divide seems to function like an insidious form control wherein the uber-rich are able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves.
Its great to see when guys like this realize its all just made of paper (literally and figuratively in this case) and they can actually just do it for themselves.
Trying to paint the uber-rich as some sort of villain here is silly.
The really interesting thing is that this is an example of the value of marketing.
Its just interesting to observe a depressed area where everyone is in want, but no one has a "job" to do. The baker can't deliver bread because his truck is broken and then mechanic has no bread so he can't work on trucks. Why? Because neither of them has any "money". Therein is the problem.
In the meantime, I don't believe the wealthy are exercising a substantial form of control here.
Background: India was without effective sanitary pads for most of human history. Recently, in the past few hundred years or so, some people became fantastically wealthy. At some point, several sanitary pad manufacturers were set up that sold their products, mostly in developed nations and not rural India.
Are you saying wealthy people stopped the people of India from manufacturing their own sanitary pads before this guy came around to the scene? They certainly didn't stop these people after he came around. It looks to me more like there just wasn't anyone who bothered to bring the sanitary-pad manufacturing technology there yet: the wealthy who were interested in the pursuit of money were pursuing easier or more profitable opportunities, and the wealthy interested in making a difference in the world (including those who would just give money away) were unaware of this need.
There are plenty of things that plenty of wealthy people/businesses can/actually do that keep the little man down in plenty of situations. This just... doesn't look like one of them. Poverty is the natural state of Man.
Some economies of scale are attainable with small numbers of (or single) craftsmen. If you can batch operations, one person can rotate though steps of a process over the course of a day, or of days.
Another factor in the Industrial Revolution was the addition of both energy and capital. Where early energy sources were often inconveniently located: mill towns were, literally, located on waterways or elsewhere free energy was possible, often quite distant (and over very poor roads) from major populations, which is to say, either labor or markets.
The revolutions of steam and electricity meant that the scale of operations of factories could be both scaled up and down: smaller-scale equipment means that a local shop can produce goods, though typically this means on a highly specialized basis.
Other factors tend to increase cost of goods: advertising, marketing, and competitive fencing via exclusive marketing arrangements, patent enforcement, and the like.
Edit: link http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/bartering-veget...
A study in 2011 said that 70% couldn't afford sanitary napkins [0]. Until 2011 or so, sanitary napkins attracted a 14% luxury tax [1]. They were now reduced to 1%, only after pressure from NGOs.
[0] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/70-cant-afford-sani...
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/ove...
I wonder if 'letting go' of the supply chain - regardless of the repercussions - would allow these methods to evolve...
Similar problem was in communist Czechoslovakia. There was only one factory making hygiene products for entire country, but it burned down on second year of 5 year plan. Central planning committee could not be arsed to change the plan...
And then, even after having practically everyone around him ostracize and abandon him, he doesn't go for the money, but remains humble and does the best he can to make the world a better place.
Hell there is odd separation in the states amongst some of the workers from that country. You can see it in the groupings, who has lunch together, those who walk apart or turn down a hall when meeting
are you suggesting that caste system is related to skin color?
I'm very impressed by his dedication, perseverance and inspiring outlook on life.
Something to think about.
[X] Not Hacker News
Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water. This one humble guy has done more good for more people in India than 1000 grandiose schemes such as OLPC. And he wants to expand to 106 countries. I wish him well.
Also, does your quipper think that women aren't important? I always find it amusing when people wax philosophical about equality whilst retreating into sexist terminology to do so. Instead of 'poor men', 'the poor' or 'poor people' works to the same effect.
English is a wonderfully flexible language and there are a dozen different ways to say the same thing here. Hand-waving away the hypocrisy in that statement as being a more powerful (barely, at that) literary device is just being lazy.
I'd also counter that the proper literary device is 'rich man/poor mAn', not 'rich man/poor mEn'. A small but meaningful difference.
Not that tired old argument again. Yes, it is true. But lots also do. And lots have cellular broadband, and tons of relatively poor people have access to smartphones. Not all of the third world is the same.
And looking at the OLPC site now, they're up to 2.4 million of the thing. Not quite the numbers they'd hoped for, perhaps, but still 2.4 million children in developing countries who now have access to computing.
There's room for projects trying to address more than one issue, for more than one group of people.
And having the gumption to fight years of laughter, isolation, mockery and ridicule to only chase what you believe in is a very different thing than just building a company. You are fighting forces that you would do anything to see you fail. And this is beyond the merit of your product.
I salute this guy for not just what he has achieved. Though the margins he achieved will be eventually matched by bigger companies.
In many ways this is like the first man climbing the Everest or first space agency going to the moon. Others have been there after the first attempt. But the people who do it first, face significant obstacles. And they inspire all of us.
Sounds exactly like a startup.
When you want to change the world, nobody understands you.
Then suddenly things start working, and everybody "just knew" what you were doing was important.
They say that you identify pioneers by the arrows in their back.
And additionally, why it is never a good idea to underestimate someone because of a lack of formal education.
Sounds like he got a pretty solid biology lesson along the way.
I would give this one to Muruganantham.
Love this quote!
(His email address is public on his company's site [1])
[1] http://newinventions.in/contactus.aspx
It makes me wonder, how many other people are out there who have the same passion for something, but haven't had any success? Only a select few will have success, most will fail. I think we should celebrate the people who took risks and failed too. But sadly you won't find articles written about them as it isn't a happy ending like this one.
Hygiene
Much of the point of having any money at all is so I can avoid doing things I hate doing. Are things really so different for you?
I suspect the answer is the same in both cases: lack of clean water and effective sterilization methods. If you wash your rags in dirty water and do not expose them to the sterilizing UV rays of direct sunlight, you're giving yourself infections. The machine uses a UV light to sterlize, and does not require a reliable water supply.
When every village in India has access to ample amounts of clean-from-the-tap water, they may choose to revisit their current solution.
I believe TED is a sandbox for a number of powerful people to work out their interpersonal arguments about whether tech is good for the world or not. As such you will hear all presentations subtly presented in this light without the participants (presenters nor audience members) being aware. It's essentially a gladiatorial arena funded by the well-to-do, cleverly disguised as another "gee whiz" tech conference.
As such, stories and material are distorted toward arguing the spectral ends of the conference creators.
This is why there are so many stories presented that "make tech look silly, bad or overextended." They're placements by forces within the internal TED conflict that are trying to diminish public opinion about the benefits of technological practice.
Make no mistake- these people are happy to see TED come off as foolish or ruinous, b/c it supports their contingent's goals. They have founded TED with the intention of presenting foolish ideas to tarnish the concept of technology as a practice.
So, the age old advice applies here - take everything with a grain of salt. When you hear a presentation, get what you can out of it, realize it's not the full picture and seek out the missing pieces. Do not rely on TED for a coherent or complete picture of anything. It's just an artifact of debating idealogues.