Untouched by the technology revolution, a large mass of Indian women still live with the old age practice of using dirty rags, pieces of cloth and other unhygienic mechanisms during periods.
With affordability being the major obstacle for poor women in using sanitary napkins, a student-teacher duo from ITM University have designed a low cost sanitary napkin making machine that can make a sanitary napkin available for just Rs 2.5.
This unique effort by a mechanical engineering student Surbhit Arora under the tutelage of his professor Ashwini Sharma is directed at developing low-cost sanitary napkins to help rural women maintain better standards of hygiene and health.
It took almost a year for the two to come up with the machine which included virtual equipment design, virtual testing and simulation along with the fabrication and assembling of the machine parts in college labs and workshops.
The napkin is produced in a three step process of pressing, sealing and cutting and the machine has the ability to operate these steps in a single cycle with a capacity to produce four napkins in a minute. The material used for making the napkins is wood pulp that is biodegradable.
The machine is semi-automatic in nature and consumes very small amount of power. The machine can be used to run small and medium enterprises producing sanitary napkins at a very low price, allowing the rural women to take care of their personal hygiene. The mechanism can also provide employment to women in rural areas.
Elaborating on his project, Surbhit says, “There are many MNCs operating in this area but they do not have a rural reach owing to the non-affordability of sanitary napkins in these belts. I plan to setup a rural enterprise where the community could benefit itself by producing low-cost napkins on its own.”
The duo hope that their invention would go a long way in ensuring that the sanitary napkin making process gets revolutionized and the product can be sold in rural and remote areas at a much lower price than available in the market.
Funded by the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad (under the Design Clinic Scheme of MSME for Rs 1.5 lakh), the project has already won laurels for its sensitivity to the needs of the rural community in the area of hygiene and healthcare of women.