A daily wage labourer ( Mannam Madhusudana Rao. ) who turned multimillionaire . The 39-year-old, the fifth child of an illiterate labourer couple and only the second of their eight to be educated, now helms various ventures that bring in a turnover of between Rs 75 crore and Rs 90 crore.
The journey he has traversed covers much more than the 400 kilometres between his village, Palukuru in Andhra Pradesh's Prakasam district, and the capital.
For Rao was not only born into an impoverished family, he is also a Dalit, though he prefers to use the terms "working class people" and "our community" in multiple conversations over two days.
His story has been highlighted in the recent book, Defying The Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurship (by Devesh Kapur, D Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad; published by Random House India), and is the subject of a PBS documentary scheduled to be broadcast in the United States early next year. And it is a rather remarkable one, of creating opportunities and, as the title of the book says, defying the odds.
Rao has just returned from meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi with other delegates of the Dalit Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or DCCI.
"We were initially given only 10 minutes but that stretched to 30 minutes and he spoke to each of us individually," says the recently-appointed president of the organisation's Andhra chapter.
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