My plea is that don't wait for a girl to become a woman to empower them. Empower a girl's life by giving sanitary pads to them. With pads, we give them wings.
You can send women to the Moon or Mars later. First, provide sanitary pads to them.
Social entrepreneurship is like a butterfly, sucking honey from a flower, but the flower won't die. They're helping the flower to make pollination.
There are two kinds of students: those who study and work to survive, while others who want to be achievers.
The taboo regarding menstruation exists across the world, even among the educated.
Imagine: I got patent rights to the only machine in the world to make low-cost sanitary napkins - a hot-cake product. Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood, I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance.
I am becoming a solution provider. I'm very happy. I don't want to make this as a corporate entity. I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe.
I always say, 'Be near science and technology, and you will never fail.'
I don't have any plans to make money for myself. All I wish to do is empower rural women in our country.
Even if I can take sanitary napkins to 10% of the poor women in India, it will be big achievement.
Luckily, I'm not educated. If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop.
Every father, brother, and husband should know about menstruation. It is not just about women; it is about men, too.
It took me eight years of trial and error to design the machines that would make low-cost pads: just Rs 2 each, compared to those made by the MNCs that are priced anywhere above Rs 6 to Rs 100.
I am the son of a hand-loom weaver. I have a connection with yarn. I thought, 'Why not try to make an affordable sanitary pad for my wife?'
A male can be a boy, a man, a love/husband, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, but they don't have any knowledge what's happening inside a woman's body. That's what I had learnt in my early married life.
The strong creation created by God in the world is not the lion, not the elephant, not the tiger - the girl.
When I tell a foreign audience that 90 per cent of Indian women have no access to sanitary napkin, there is a visible disbelief. But there is hardly a ripple when I say the same thing to an Indian crowd.
I have not hung a single award on my walls, including the Padma Shri.
A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy? What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one?
If you chase a girl, the girl won't like you. Do your job simply, the girl will chase you.
