Dalit entrepreneurs: Enduring tale of Saroj & Kamble's gumption, rise

New Delhi School dropout, child bride, slum dweller, suicide survivor, businesswoman, prominent face of dalit enterprise. That, in one simplistic sentence, is the against-all-odds story of Kalpana Saroj, one of the two dalit entrepreneurs bestowed the Padma Shri award for trade and industry in 2012.

Saroj has interests in real estate, sugar, steel and films, but is best known for picking up a company called Kamini Tubes from the sick bed in 2006 - debt of Rs 116 crore, salary and provident fund dues of over 500 workers, and 170 court cases - and giving it a new life.

If Saroj asked to be noticed with her business acumen, which are sometimes coloured by her political connections, Milind Kamble is making his presence felt by constantly being at the vanguard of dalit enterprise, in multiple ways.

Kamble heads a Rs 100 crore Pune-based infrastructure company called Fortune Constructions, but is better known as the founder-chairman of Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries (Dicci), an industry association that seeks to promote dalit entrepreneurship by giving them better access to business and capital markets.

There are several dalit entrepreneurs in the Indian business firmament, most of them self-made and thriving without preferred treatment. In July 2011, ET had featured 10 of them in a series titled “The Rise of Dalit Enterprise”.

Given that scheduled castes (SCs), or dalits, make up about 180 million of the 1.2 billion Indians, the Padma awards to Kamble and Saroj are a small, yet significant, achievement in a larger context.