Kalpana Saroj
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Kalpana Saroj
Anahita Mukherji The Times of India Feb 08 2015, Dalit honcho scripts `historic' buy
Kalpana Saroj is chairperson of Kamani Tubes and winner of the 2013 Padma Shri award.
Kalpana Saroj was born, a couple of years after Dr Ambedkar's death, to a poor Dalit family in rural Vidarbha. Married off at the age of 12 to a man many years older, she was tormented by her in-laws and her marriage fell apart before she turned 13. After a failed suicide bid, she was determined to make something of her life and chose to script her success in Mumbai.
When she first arrived in the city, she worked as a seamstress for Rs 2 a day . She then took a loan, turned entrepreneur and finally worked her way up the ladder. Nearly a decade ago, she took control of Kamani Tubes when the company was sick and turned it around.
The house on King Henry Road
In July 2014, Saroj was in Paris to attend a conference organized by the Ambedkar International Mission, a global organization of Dalits around the world. “After the conference, a few of us headed to London. Whenever we're in the city , we make it a point to visit the house where Ambedkar once lived,“ says Saroj, who was accompanied on her visit by R K Gaikwad, Maharashtra's former commissioner for social welfare, and Gautam Chakravarthy of the Federation of Ambedkarites & Buddhist Organizations, UK, among others. “We [noticed that] the house was up for sale,” she says, adding that it cost Rs 40 crore, more than any Dalit organization could afford.
For the next six months, Saroj teamed up with prominent members of the Dalit community in India and the UK and lobbied with the Centre [Government of India ] and the [Maharashtra] state government to bid for the house.
The Maharashtra government agreed and succeeded in buying the house.
