41-year-old Laxmi Kumari is a single mother and is based in Jharkhand. When she was in Class 12, she had to drop out of school due to a financial crisis. Despite dropping out of school, she never gave up. She had faced a lot of troubles, but she didn’t come across the thought of giving up. Her determination and hard work made her a successful entrepreneur.
She disclosed that her parents could hardly manage to feed her and her three other siblings, so going to college seemed like a silly idea. At that time she felt powerless, but she knew that this couldn’t be the end of her quest for freedom. She desired to do something that might enable her to stand on her own two feet.
Laxmi even registered in a beauty training course in 2011 to stand on her feet. But, before she could start working and realize the benefits of her degree, she got married, and her emphasis had to shift once more. In 2012, she was blessed with a baby girl for whom she wish a better life. But she and her husband parted their ways.
. In 2016, when she and her husband parted ways, she received no financial support from her husband and found herself in an extremely helpless position. Laxmi has faced many problems in her childhood, so she didn’t want her daughter to endure those difficulties. She wanted to provide her daughter with a better life and wanted to gain freedom for herself.
She decided to complete her education and start a bachelor’s in arts from The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). In 2016, she also started to take a teacher training course followed by counseling in 2017. But now she has another problem as she has to leave her daughter at home to do a full-time job which she doesn’t want because she wanted to be there for her daughter and help her with her studies, something that her mother who lives with her, couldn’t have done.
In May 2021, she saw a six-part inspirational video story of Hasrat Bano. It was the inspirational journey of Hasrat Bano, a homemaker-turned-entrepreneur from rural India. She decided to start a parlor business and instantly applied to join the project S.H.E which is an initiative to back and educate women from small towns and villages in India to conquer key barriers to entrepreneurship.
In two months, she got a call back with some brilliant news. Among more than 400 applications, she was one of the 30 chosen as rural women entrepreneurs. She was being given a grant worth Rs 50,000 to start her business and to finally attain the independence she always dreamed of.
