From Ten Soaps a Week to Four Hundred

I started making soap at home four years ago. I could sell maybe ten bars a week at the local market, and only when there was a fair. When Asmakam Gram listed our collective, the orders came from cities I had never visited — Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi. We now make four hundred bars a week and eleven women work with me. Six of them had no income of their own before this. My daughter is in college now. She wants to study chemistry. She says she will make better soap than me.