Sanitary pads, job creation and nationalism

Well, this is precisely what Arunachalam Muruganantham, a school dropout from a poor family in Southern India, did.

It was, however, not out of any desire to be on a list featuring the likes of Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Jeff Bezos, Malala Yousafzai, Shinzo Abe, Beyonce and many others, but out of love and empathy for his wife. 

In 1998, newly married Muruganantham noticed that his wife, Santhi, used dirty rags he “wouldn’t even clean [his] scooter with” – for her periods. Santhi knew about sanitary towels, but said she could not afford them. 

Shocked at the extremely “unsanitary pads” his wife and, as it turned out, 88 per cent of Indian women used at the time, he embarked on a quest to make affordable sanitary pads. 

To cut a five-and-a-half year story short, risking wife, life and reputation, he ended up creating the world’s first low-cost sanitary towel-producing machine. 

You probably wouldn’t normally associate sanitary pads with dignity, but that’s what they gave to Indian women, not to mention help prevent urinary tract infections and other diseases, as well as reducing maternal mortality rates.

The user-friendly technology he used also made it possible for rural women to operate, therefore, creating jobs for them. 

When Muruganantham beat 942 entries to the first prize in a competition for national innovation and was given the award by the president of India, he was in the limelight.

For Muruganantham it could have been a rags-to-riches opportunity. But instead of selling his idea to the highest bidder, he supplied his low-cost machines to the poorest rural communities, providing millions of women with employment and even the opportunity to own their own pad-manufacturing businesses.

May 20 is Indonesia’s 107th National Awakening Day, marking the 1908 formation of the first nationalist group, Budi Utomo. 

All well and good, but what does “national pride” or “nationalism” mean in today’s Indonesia? Large numbers of Indonesians struggle to find something that makes them genuinely proud of their nation.

Instead they are bombarded with daily stories of rampant corruption and dysfunction in government.

Indonesian nationalism has been dubbed a “nationalism of resentment” rather than of pride or achievement. 

That’s perhaps understandable in a country that was pushed around by colonial rulers for centuries. 

But does it mean we have to kill off drug-traffickers to prove our pride and dignity?

When are the country’s leaders going to focus on giving Indonesia’s younger generation national achievements they can be really proud of? Turbo-charging the country’s economy would be a good place to start.

How about doing something like Muruganantham did as a concrete form of economic nationalism?

He started on a small, cottage-industry scale, but now his sanitary pad machines have been installed in 26 states in India and exported to several other countries. 

There are plenty of cottage industries in Indonesia as well. But unlike Indonesia, India has large-scale, globally competitive manufacturing.

Indonesia is not a leading producer of any manufactured goods, so how about taking inspiration from India?

Recently, a blueprint was offered by Gus Papanek, one of the most sophisticated observers of Indonesia’s economy for over half a century, in a book titled “The Economic Choices Facing the Next President”, published by the think-tank Transformasi.

Co-authored with Raden Pardede and Suahasil Nazara, it’s about creating desperately needed quality jobs in labour-intensive manufacturing that could result in double-digit growth. 

It’s a once-in-a-century opportunity because, as Papanek points out, China is losing competitiveness as the world’s largest exporter of labour-intensive manufactured goods:

“Wages are rising and the yuan, China’s national currency, is beginning to appreciate against the dollar, euro and yen.” 

Naturally, other countries, mainly in Asia, will grab a share of China’s export market in this sector.

The authors estimate that Indonesia can increase manufactured exports by US$110 billion over the next five years.

“These additional manufactured goods, combined with the multiplier effect from higher domestic demand as workers spend their additional income, would create 21 million good, productive jobs by 2019.”

But to achieve that goal Indonesia must also improve infrastructure (roads, power plants, etc), reduce fuel subsidies, implement tax reforms and perhaps even devalue the rupiah, say the authors. 

Indonesians get their fix of nationalism with celebrations every May 20, but our patriotic pride should be geared to more than just one day a year. Our focus should be on the future of the nation. Are we going to keep on operating in banana-republic style and keep relying on exporting raw materials and agricultural products like palm oil? Are we going to allow ourselves to remain at the bottom of the lists of achievers and the top of the lists of losers, and persist in our nationalism of resentment? 

Or are we willing to try something different, like a school dropout in India did?

Let’s throw out our 7 per cent growth mentality like Muruganantham threw out his wife’s dirty rags, and go for “sanitary pads”: a double-digit economic growth mentality!