Chetna sinha biography

Images: Mexy Xavier

Forbes India Leadership Award Entrepreneur With Social Impact

Vanita Pise’s single-storeyed house just off the village centre in Mhaswad, in Maharashtra’s Satara district, is abuzz on the eve of Diwali.

Pise is on her feet delivering instructions and inspecting how a consignment of wheat has been packaged by a cluster of villagers milling around. Once done, she retires to an adjacent room and settles down in front of a machine into which she nimbly feeds sheets of paper, seven to a batch, to be cut and chiselled into plates.

Sets of finished bundles are arranged in ceiling-high stacks around the room, perhaps dwarfed only by her entrepreneurial ambitions.

Pise wouldn’t have imagined her current life when she came to Mhaswad as an year-old bride in The family she was married into had a poultry business that ran into losses when avian flu struck, and income from working in the fields was meagre,