Lakhpati Didi Story: How Purnima Senapati Transformed Her Life with a Homegrown Idea
The shelves at her stall are almost empty but that’s not worrying Purnima Senapati. If anything, it’s an endorsement that her efforts have found a larger market in far away Delhi too.
The 39-year-old is part of a Self Help Group from Odisha’s Sundargarh. It is her first time in Delhi. Her stall was stocked with til (sesame) laddus, millet flour, millet products, millet cookies, mohua chocolates, groundnut and jaggery laddus – all organic and homemade. Three days before the end of the Trade Fair, the shelves are almost empty. “Lag raha hai sab kuch bik jayega.” (I think we will be sold out till the last day, maybe earlier).
“I wasn’t even that comfortable speaking in Hindi,” she tells us quite confidently, in Hindi, no less. “I’ve picked it up here. My interaction with customers at the Trade Fair has helped me.” On the way to the hotel where she is staying, she speaks to the auto rickshaw driver in Hindi, same with the hotel staff while ordering food – anything to practice and better it.
Just four years ago, it was a completely different story. She would step out daily, tiffin in hand, and work on other people’s fields for a daily wage. At the end of the month, she would barely make a few hundred rupees.
“I’ve always wanted to run some business of my own. One day, I thought I will make til laddus (sesame laddus). It was a complete disaster. Then I tried again. This time, it was marginally better. I took some of the laddus to a nearby store and requested the shopkeeper to keep it. His initial reaction was – ‘Nobody wants these things nowadays.'”
Yet, she persisted. She offered to leave some samples with the storekeeper. A few days later, he reached out to her saying people were interested in the laddus and more people were asking about it. And that was how it started.
“I started getting more orders. Some days, if the orders were large, I would request more women to help out.” That has now taken the form of a thriving self help group and she’s one of eight women who are a part of it. With the help of the government and its Lakhpati Didi scheme, they have been given support to learn about packaging and reaching out to the market with their products.
Lakhpati Didi is an initiative by the Ministry of Rural Development, that aims to uplift rural women from Self-Help Groups (SHGs) to achieve an annual household income of over ₹1 lakh by providing skill development, financial literacy, and entrepreneurial support, encouraging sustainable livelihoods and economic independence across rural India.
Purnima Senapati’s husband, a sickle cell patient, is very supportive of her entrepreneurial journey. “The ‘lakhpati didi’ scheme has made a world of a difference to my life. I couldn’t have imagined I would be doing this just four years ago. My husband now calls me ‘smart-didi.'”