Kalpana Saroj was married off at twelve years old, as was common in her village at the time, and moved into a household where she says she was treated poorly and eventually returned to her parents' home at sixteen, in circumstances considered deeply shameful within her community — an experience so painful that, by her own account, she attempted to take her own life shortly afterward.
She survived, moved to Mumbai to live with an uncle, and took up work as a tailor, earning barely enough to get by, sewing for hours a day in cramped conditions while slowly saving whatever small amount she could set aside from each week's earnings.
With a government loan available to entrepreneurs from Scheduled Caste communities, she started a small furniture business, and later took the far riskier step of buying a stake in a failing engineering company that was deeply in debt and on the verge of shutting down entirely, a move most people around her considered financially reckless.
She restructured the company, negotiated with its creditors, and turned it profitable within a few years, eventually building a business empire spanning real estate, construction, and manufacturing worth several hundred crore rupees — becoming one of India's most well-known self-made women entrepreneurs, from a background where her own family had once considered her a source of shame.