A small counterargument: that industrial machine produces 21,000 napkins per hour = 500,000 per day = 15,000,000 per month. So, it would serve say 500,000 women. In highly rural areas of India, the distribution of the product would require quite a complex distribution mechanism.
Indeed, it is not clear if that is just for the machine which produces the napkins or for the entire production line.
Also to take in consideration is
- warehouse area to store raw materials
- some kind of financial system to manage purchase orders / sales orders
21,000 napkins / hour. Let's assume there's 10 in a box, 8 boxes to a case and 30 cases in a pallet.
So that's 2400 napkins / pallet = ~ 9 pallets per hour. You're also going to need labelling, conveyors, people to pack the boxes, people to pack the cases, people to stack the pallets and then a few fork lifts to move the pallets plus of course engineering staff to maintain all this.
So it's not really small machine v big machine, it's small machine v production line which adds a lot of complexity.
