A Dalit child bride who fought hard against what life had offered her and went on to become a successful entrepreneur. A Padma Shree recipient, Kalpana Saroj’s story is one that inspires

The music from the loudspeakers in the village still rings in her ears and she can almost feel the kumkum smothered on her entire forehead, tingling her skin. “The music at my wedding was played on two speakers instead of one, so it was considered a big grand wedding that the entire village spoke about.” But unlike a bride who should be looking forward to wedded bliss, this one was nervous and sad at the same time. Wouldn’t any 12-year-old be?

One of the four siblings, Kalpana Saroj was the daughter of a constable in Vidarbha village in Maharashtra. When family pressure made Saroj’s father give in to the demand of getting his daughter married according to tradition, she couldn’t believe her bad luck. “You see, I was a very good student. Most teachers were proud of me and would tell other students to be like me,” she says. As a little girl, Saroj wanted to grow up and join the police force like her father or may be even the armed forces. “Or do anything to serve the country. I also wanted to study a lot. I still remember I was writing my exams when I was suddenly pulled out of school and married off. I was so sad,” she recalls.

Today, 41 years after that wedding and many disasters that followed, that girl, now a woman, sitting in a room in a five-star hotel in Delhi, just back from a business trip to Geneva, Saroj can barely believe it’s her own story she is narrating. But don’t they say fortune favours the brave?

Today, Kalpana Saroj is a successful entrepreneur with eight profitable companies under the Kalpana Saroj Group of companies. She won a Padma Shree, is a director in Bharatiya Mahila Bank, has travelled to many countries and still works 16 hours a day.

Of course, the journey was not easy, but Saroj decided to take the challenges in her stride. After getting married, she decided to stick to the values she was given at home. “I went through hell. I was starved and beaten for every little thing. It was a living hell for me”, she shares. That her husband was 10-12 years older than her didn’t help the situation. Within six months, the sufferings were writ large on her face and body. When her father came to see her, he couldn’t believe what he saw. “My father decided to take me back home.” she says.

That, of course, was not the end of her sufferings. There was a community backlash. She heard snide remarks about her all the time, of how she had bought disgrace to the family and how she should kill herself rather than put her family through hell. One day, the young girl decided to do just that.

She bought three bottles of Tik- 20 (an insecticide to kill bedbugs) from a medical store, and went to her aunt, who stayed two km away. Once Saroj found herself alone there, she gulped all three bottles. When she woke up, she was in the hospital. She had survived. But the jibes only grew. “I heard things such as ‘What horrible things she must have done to try and kill herself?’ ‘Look at the misery she is putting her parents through’. That is the day I realised no matter what I did, people would talk. That is the day I decided I would change my life”, she says calmly.

She couldn’t bear to live in her village anymore so she told her parents she wanted to go and stay with one of her uncles in Mumbai and work. The parents in turn were happy their daughter was finally fighting back. In a few months, she was working in a hosiery factory in Sunmill Compound in Parel. Initially a helper, she was soon given a chance to sew vests. “I would be given Rs 2 for every vest. I was happy but somehow my hands couldn’t move on the sewing machine. Hopelessness crept but I decided to quash it,” she smiles. So when other workers were out for a break she would get back to practice sewing. Soon, she became one of the good workers. “I remember I made Rs 225 in the first month. That was the first time I saw a 100 rupees note and it felt like a dream.”

Her father, meanwhile, had lost his job and the eldest daughter of the family that she was, Saroj decided to take the responsibility of the family head on. “I rented a room for Rs 40 a month in Kalyan. It was a tiny place but at least all of us were together. I was happy,” she says. But life wasn’t easy. With one earning member and six mouths to feed, the family faced tough times. It was then that another life-changing experience happened. Saroj’s younger sister fell sick and there wasn’t enough money to take her to a hospital. “I saw my young sister die in front of my eyes. That day I realised the importance of money. I wasn’t prepared to see another family member lost to poverty. I decided to earn all the money I could.”

This was in the early 1970s and one day while listening to the radio, she heard about a loan scheme for women. “I thought I would take a loan and start a boutique since I was already good at stitching”, she shares. But she opted for a more profitable venture — a furniture store. “We lived in a middle-class locality in Ulhas Nagar, where people couldn’t buy expensive furniture. So I decided to manufacture cheaper versions of the nice ones in the market. With a loan of 50,000 that I managed to get, I took the plunge,” she shares.

School dropout she may be, but Saroj’s determination to make it big, combined with her hard work soon made her business profitable. She decided to take another risk and bought a litigation-locked land for a pittance. This was a tough job but she feels a daredevil had taken over her spirit. “After I had seen death so closely, I was scared of nothing. I decided to throw caution to the winds and make it big no matter what it took.”

The local goons who wanted to encroach the land opposed. In fact, they decided to hire a contract killer. “Meri panch lakh ki supari nikali thi (They had hired a contract killer for Rs 5 lakh to kill me). It was 1995, I still remember”, she laughs. Thankfully for her, one of them felt for the hardworking woman and revealed the plot. Saroj immediately went to the police commissioner who investigated the case and got the men arrested.

The very next day, Saroj, who was now in her early 20s, went to the police commissioner and told him she needed a licensed gun. In 24 hours, she had a licensed gun — one that she still carries. “I requested the commissioner to call these men out. When they stood in front of me, I put the revolver on the table and told them, ‘I have six bullets in the revolver. After the sixth gets over, someone can kill me’.”

Saroj spent the next two years getting the land cleared and her hard work paid off. She got a partner to build a building on that land.

With every challenge, she saw her strength grow. She decided to contribute to the society, something that was always close to the heart. So she began an NGO, Sushikshit Berozgar Yuvak Sangathan. The idea of the NGO was to inform the poor about various schemes they could avail of and to also help them with training and sometimes even employment. “I had seen poverty from close quarters and wanted to help as many poor as I could,” says Saroj.

Soon she had earned a lot of respect among the locals. It was during this time that Kamani Tubes, one of the three companies started by visionary Ramjibhai Kamani, was going through a rough patch, thanks to a family dispute after the entrepreneur died. Kamani Tubes, Kamani Engineering and Kamani Metal were all in trouble.

One of the companies had been bought over, another liquidated — what remained was Kamani tubes.

With two strong labour unions, this became the first company in India that the Supreme Court decided to give to workers. The workers managed to run it somehow from 1987 to 1997, but it had started showing sure sign of distress.

IDBI, which was the operating agency, found that the company would soon become a defaulter. The power and water supplies had been cut and it was only a matter of time that the factory would be locked out.

The workers were obviously under tremendous stress.

That is when 566 of them went to Saroj and asked her to help and overtake the company. “I didn’t know how to react. I mean I had been managing small businesses but how would I run a company of that scale? I had never done anything this big. Besides, how would I handle the financial mess? But the look of hope on the faces of the workers told me I needed to do something. I decided to take another risk,” she says.

In 2000, when Kamani Tubes finally came to Saroj, it had a Rs 116-crore liability, 104 litigation cases and two sheds in the name of a factory, with many parts of the machines missing.

Saroj also knew that the lives of many families depended on this factory; she couldn’t imagine another sister dying in any family because of poverty. “I formed a 19-member team and got into action mode. I became obsessed with work. When night fell, I felt horrible since it meant I had to sleep for a few hours,” says the workaholic.

From 2000 to 2006, courts were her second home. But the hard work paid off. In 2006, she was appointed chairman of the company and the court transferred ownership of Kamani Tubes to Saroj. In 2009, she bought a seven-acre land in Wada where the company now stands.

Today Kamani Tubes is just one of the eight companies that keep the entrepreneur busy. In between all this, she got married in 1978, and had two children. Her son is a pilot and flies a Boeing, she shares proudly. Her daughter has just returned from London after an MBA degree. “I want to open a five-star hotel for her, let’s see.”

Of course, Saroj would like to see her daughter married, but she will not forget to tell her that it is just one of the things in a woman’s life. “A woman is capable of achieving so much. She is Shakti herself. She can do all that she wants. All she has to do is reach for the power which lies deep within her. The only limitations that exist are the ones that are in our minds.”