Padman Arunachalam Muruganantham’s story included in Tamil Nadu Class XII syllabus

COIMBATORE: From this year, Class XII biology group students, following the Tamil Nadu state board syllabus, will study a small sub chapter on padman Arunachalam Muruganantham and his journey towards innovating a machine that can provide affordable sanitary napkins for women to use during menstruation.
While Muruganantham’s story is a regular feature at most social entrepreneurship and innovation modules even at IIT, this is the first time that school students have got a chapter on him.
It was in February this year that the New Delhi government contacted him wanting to include his story in their state board textbooks. However, in mid-March, Muruganantham got a phone call from one of his schoolteachers, Vivekanandhan, who taught Class VII in the Papanaickenpudur Government Middle School. “He told me he had just downloaded the latest Class XII state board bio-zoology textbooks and saw a chapter on me in it. I was confused because it was the Delhi government who called me. I anyway did not want to reveal it till the official textbooks were printed and distributed,” he said.
On Monday, when schools reopened across the state and the bio-zoology text books were distributed to students, Muruganantham realised that the information was true.
“The thought that our Tamil Nadu students and my own children who are in school will one day study about me fills me with a warmth and sense of accomplishment that I can’t explain,” he said.
Muruganantham says the chapter has an outdated information since it stated he has established 250 machines while the actual number is more than 5,000 now.
Muruganantham says this chapter on him breaks two glass ceilings—one aspirational and one social. “When I was in school, we studied only about Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein and Marconi as inventors. Students subconsciously believe that only old people, with long beards and European names can be inventors and innovators. Now they know that’s not true. I was much younger, came from a poor background, did not have a proper education and innovated something to bring a social change,” he says.
“The social change is making students study about mensuration, a woman’s problem, and telling them that there are boys and men who work on the issue,” he adds.