The other side to India’s sanitary pad revolution | Rose George

Thanks to the likes of Menstrual Man periods are now out in the open: now it's time to be equally bold about the waste problem posed by millions more pads

Muruga reaches down and puts a sanitary towel between his legs. It's actually a postpartum pad for women who have just given birth, and who don't use underwear, hence the ingenious elastic loop that holds the pad in place.

Muruga's full name is Arunchalam Muruganantham but he is better known as Menstrual Man. He is a one-off, and his story is enchanting: who else would have tested their own sanitary pad design by taking a football bladder, filling it with goat blood, then wearing it for weeks? "I became like a woman," he tells me in his factory in Coimbatore, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. "Always checking behind me, to check for staining."

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