According to the article and his website the machine costs $2,500 each, can produce 2 napkins per minute and requires 746W of power. Each machine employs a crew of four people.
A full scale industrial machine is claimed to cost $500K and, from a quick bit of google-ing can produce 350 napkins per minute and requires about 80KW of power. Each machine seems to be operable by a small team of five or so, but let's double that to ten people.
In order to match the production rate of a single industrial machine you would need:
Machines: 175
Cost: $437,500
Power: 131KW
Workers: 700
According to this (http://mahadiscom.com/emagazine/jan06/india1%5B1%5D.pdf) electricity cost in India runs around 1.5 rupees per KWh for residential and 3.5 rupees per KWh for industrial applications. Assuming ten hours per day (for easy math) the power costs compare as follows (converted to USD):
175 low cost machines @131KWh in household settings: USD $37 per day.
Industrial machine @80KWh in industrial setting: USD $52.87 per day.
The industrial machine cost a little more to run (power) but it produces 175 times more product per machine. Put a different way, around USD $0.03 of power is required per napkin with the household machine. The industrial machine --even at more than double the electricity cost-- only requires USD $0.0003 per napkin in power.
In terms of labor costs --assuming $1 per hour-- the household machine would cost about $0.033 per napkin while the industrial machine runs $0.0005 per napkin.
According to the linked statistic the TAM (Total Addressable Market) is around 300 million women:
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-01-23/india...
If his dream to "make India a 100% napkin-using country" is fully realized you would need to produce a minimum of 1500 million napkins per month (assuming five pads used per period). The solutions compare as follows:
Assuming that the machines are run 24 hours per day for 30 days.
- Household solution
Machines: 17362
Cost: $43,405,000
Power: 12MW
Labor cost per 30 days: $25,001,280
- Industrial Solution:
Machines: 100
Cost: $50,000,000
Power: 8MW
Labor cost per 30 days: $90,000
Unless my numbers are grossly wrong (please check, I threw them together quickly) this is not as good a solution as it has been made out to be. In fact, it looks like a really bad solution to a large scale problem. The costs are staggering. Power consumption is at least 50% greater. I'll bet that product quality and consistency also suffers a great deal. And, of course, we haven't even covered maintenance costs and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 18,000 low-cost machines versus 100 industrial grade machines.
Good job. Lots of work. But I'd invest in a used industrial machine out of China over making thousands of these low cost household devices.