‘Padman’ figures in Tamil Nadu's Class XII textbooks

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. While Muruganantham’s story is a regular feature at most social entrepreneurship and innovation modules, even at IIT, this is the first time school students will have a chapter on him.
Muruganantham says the decision by the education department to include a chapter on him in textbooks achieves two purposes — telling students that you don’t need to be an old bearded European to invent or innovate; and making students study and understand menstruation, always considered a woman’s problem, and telling boys that it is normal to try working on making the process better for women.
It was around February this year that the Delhi state government contacted him, wanting to include him in their board textbooks. However, in mid-March, Muruganantham got a call from one of his school teachers, Vivekanandhan, who taught Class VII at the Papanaickenpudur Government Middle School. “He told me he had just downloaded the latest Class XII state board bio-zoology text books and saw a chapter of 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 realized 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 Muruganantham says the chapter has published outdated information saying he has established 250 machines; the actual number stands at more than 5,000.
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 subconsciouly 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 about social change,” he says. “ The social change is making students study about menstruation, a woman’s problem, and telling them that there are boys and men who work on the issue,” he adds.