THE MOST INFLUENTIAL STORY OF THE 21ST CENTURY-Ashok Khade (Indian Entrepreneur)

How a Poor Untouchable became a Billionaire!

“I came home weeping. Upon hearing that I had slipped & dropped the small bag of flour that my mom had earned after days of labor in a puddle, my mother too began to bitterly weep with me. My brothers and sisters were to sleep hungry. There was nothing in the house.”

Mr. Ashok Khade recalled the miserable memories of his childhood when they were poor and always hungry. “That hunger gave me the drive” says Khade, “that was my starting day”. Today when he stepped down from his shimmering BMW in his village, he flashed back going barefooted to school decades ago. Verily, he had passed inescapable reminders of what he was- the well from which he was not allowed to drink; the temple where he was not permitted to worship. At school, he took his place on the floor in a part of the classroom built a step lower than the rest. Untouchables like him, considered to be spiritually and physically unclean, could not be permitted to pollute their upper-caste neighbors and classmates.

However, times have changed! Khade’s is no more a poor hungry boy. Today he owns a company that worths more than $100 million, has over 4,500 employees and is now building what will be India’s biggest jetty fabrication yard on the Maharashtra coast times. Additionally, he has recently signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Royal Family of Abu Dhabi to work on oil wells in the Middle East. “An untouchable boy the business partner of a prince?” Mr. Khade says “Who would believe that is possible?”

Khade was born in a mud hut in Ped in 1955, one of six children. His parents were day laborers who toiled in upper-caste farmers’ fields for pennies. His father would often travel to Mumbai, then known as Bombay, to work as a shoe repairman. He came from a family of Chamhars, a caste at the very bottom of the Hindu hierarchy. Their traditional job was to skin dead animals. They were poor and always hungry. 

Mr. Khade got his first big break that year, when he won admission to a school run by a charity in a nearby town. Away from the village and its deeper caste prejudice, he thrived. Upper-caste teachers nurtured him, and he strived to impress them. But caste was not entirely absent. In the school’s musty register from 1973, the year he finished high school, next to his name was his caste: Chamhar. All through school, poverty gnawed at him. Students had to provide their own paper to write their exams, and one day he found himself without even a few pennies to buy the necessary sheets of foolscap. A teacher tore pages from the attendance ledger. Too poor to buy string to tie the pages together, he used a thorn from a tree. None of it mattered. He graduated near the top of his class!

Mr. Khade dreamed of becoming a doctor and studied at a local college but Datta, his brother who supported the entire family, begged his younger brother to drop out of school and start working. Datta helped Ashok get a job as an apprentice draftsman at Mazagon Dock. What seemed like a setback turned out to be a stroke of luck. His flawless drafting skills and boundless appetite for hard work won him promotions. In 1983, he was sent to Germany to work on a submarine project.

One day, he saw the pay slip of one of his German colleagues, who earned in one month more than Mr. Khade earned in a year. “I thought about my family’s needs,” he said. “My sisters needed to get married. I knew I could do better than working for someone else. When he returned from Germany, he began laying the groundwork to start his own company. The risk was enormous, and it was almost unheard of to leave a steady job to start a company. Nevertheless, his two brothers were expert offshore welders. They had good contacts from their years at Mazagon Dock.

The economy was changing after years of stagnation as 1991 reforms began to reduce the bureaucracy’s control of the economy and stimulate growth. “It was obvious there was a chance to make a lot of money,” he said. The brothers used their savings to finance the small subcontract jobs they began with, and in 1993 they got their first big order, for some underwater jackets for an offshore oil rig from Mazagon Dock. Mr. Khade’s hunch was right, and his timings were impeccable. Faster growth meant India’s appetite for fossil fuels grew ever more rapaciously. His company, which builds and refurbishes offshore oil rigs, expanded rapidly and he is now expanding to the Middle East. 

He recently organized a meeting where Dalit businessmen pitched ideas to Tata Motors, one of India’s biggest car companies. Mr. Kamble, the Dalit contractor, said that of the 10 companies that attended, 4 had signed deals and 4 more were in negotiations. “There was a time when people like us could not even approach a company like Tata Motors,” he said. “Now we go meet them with dignity, not like beggars. We are job givers, not job seekers.”

Mr. Khade, has bought vast tracts of land around his village, the same plots where his mother, now 86, used to work for upper-caste farmers for pennies a day. Now she dresses up in expensive silk saris, rides in a chauffeured car and wears gold jewelry. The sons of upper-caste families now work for Mr. Khade’s company.

By any measure he is a man who has made it, and big!

Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence         of human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us….

                                                      Wilma Rudolph quotes

-          Originally reported in Tribune; Edited & reproduced by Batool Arhamna Haider.

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