For 39 year old Kalavathy Sridharan, the journey from being a young Dalit girl in Kumbakonam to an entrepreneur in Chennai, employing over 100 people, has not been easy. Even today she continues to face some amount of discrimination based on her caste and her gender, but she refuses to back down without a fight.
Kalavathy is the youngest of six children, and grew up in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, where her father was a postman. Growing up as a Dalit in a small town has its share of problems, she says. “Often the neighbors would openly curse our family, and we have faced our share of hostility".
As a Dalit woman industrialist, there are a number of hurdles
that one faces. “Often, we are not taken seriously, especially when we apply
for loans. That is where an organization like the Dalit Indian Chamber of
Commerce and Industry (DICCI) has come to my help,” she says. She cites an
example of the procurement rules put in place by the Government of India.
In the past three years, there has been an increase in the number of Dalit women entrepreneurs, but very few people hear of them, Dinesh Shankar, Senior Vice President, DICCI, says. “Of the 500 odd members of DICCI, there are only 20-25 women. This number may be increasing, but there is still a long way to go".
