Kalpana Saroj

Kalpana Saroj was born in 1961 in a small village in Maharashtra, India, to a Dalit family at the bottom of the caste system. She was married at twelve, as was common in her community, and moved to her husband's household, where she was reportedly treated as unpaid labour and beaten. Her father brought her home within a year, but a young divorced woman carried deep social stigma, and at sixteen, isolated and hopeless, she attempted to take her own life.

She recovered and, with a small loan from an uncle, moved to Mumbai to live in a slum and work as a tailor for a few rupees a day, later taking a low-level government job. She saved carefully and, in the 1980s, borrowed further to start a small furniture business and then moved into property, learning to navigate Mumbai's opaque and often corrupt land dealings through persistence and, by her own account, sheer refusal to be intimidated.

In 2001 she was asked to help rescue Kamani Tubes, a Mumbai engineering company that had gone bankrupt and lain shuttered for years while its workers went unpaid. She restructured its debts, brought it back into production, and returned it to profit, an achievement that made her a well known figure in Indian business and earned her the nickname the slumdog millionaire in the press.

She has spoken openly about caste discrimination and domestic abuse throughout her career, arguing that her early degradation, rather than ending her life as it nearly did, became the reason she refused to accept limits later on.