47-year-old Saka Shailaja has been doing awe-inspiring work over the last two decades in empowering and economically enabling thousands of women in Telangana – especially women from the Scheduled and Other Backward Castes. Saka Shailaja, Founder & CMD, Roja’s Group of Industries – is a Dalit entrepreneur who has till date provided free-of-cost beauty training to over 10,000 underprivileged women in the state.

Saka has successfully established herself as a visionary entrepreneur, mentor and a social worker over the years, who finds immense fulfillment in empowering women and doing something meaningful for the society. As a testimony to her outstanding entrepreneurial and social work over the years, Saka has been bestowed with many awards/accolades such as Ambedkar Award, Woman With Beautiful Heart Award, Best MSME Entrepreneur Award, among others. However, what drives Saka more than any award or recognition is seeing her students rise and shine in their lives and careers.

Ms Saka Shailaja

For instance, a few years back, while attending one of the ‘Summer Samurai’ camp events at a residential school in Telangana, Saka came across someone whom she initially thought to be a stranger — a young girl on the stage, telling the audience that she was trained by none other than “Saka Shailaja Ma’am” in the beauty and make-up domain, around 10 years back. She rightly credited all her career success to Saka’s mentorship and guidance. It was a pleasant surprise for Saka to find out that the girl, who turned out to be one of her former students, was earning a handsome salary of ₹50,000 per month! Similarly, many of Saka’s former students/trainees are today earning (either through a job or a business) somewhere between ₹10,000 to 60,000 on a monthly basis.

But Saka Shailaja has had to beat many odds to reach where she is today. Since her childhood, Saka used to be perturbed to witness the widespread discrimination and bias against the people of her caste and community. She had to discontinue studying after 10th standard due to financial issues in the family, and got married at a young age. After marriage, she was not satisfied with just being a homemaker — and rather wanted to do something on her own and earn a good income based on her efforts. With that in mind, she tried her hand at multiple professions, but her family members kept raising objections with her going outside of the house to work. This is the reason she decided to start an ‘indoor’ business, in the form of a beauty parlour.

Saka had to face innumerable social struggles before and after launching her parlour. “Initially, it was an uphill task to find a place on rent for setting up the parlour. Nobody in my town, Sirsilla, wanted to let out their space to a Dalit woman. The discrimination against the SC communities – which unfortunately continues to exist even today – made my entrepreneurship journey even more challenging,” recounts Saka Shailja.

From a small 150 sq. ft. beauty parlour in Sirsilla to founding a 3000 sq. ft. beauty school equipped with world-class facilities and a state-of-the-art beauty clinic, training and upskilling and giving job placements to thousands of women and girls through various Government-affiliated training programs, courses and certifications – Saka’s list of strides and achievements are so huge that it makes one wonder – “What if she would had given up on her entrepreneurial dreams in the first place?” (The answer to that question probably is: the society would have had to bear “unbearable volumes of losses” then)!

After spending 20+ illustrious years in the beauty services and training industry, Saka decided to take up a new challenge of entering into the beauty and household products’ manufacturing business in 2019; thus, under Roja’s Group of Industries, she started a brand named ‘SYNNOVE’ – a 100% women-run enterprise that manufactures and sells a wide range of nature-sourced herbal products such as soaps, hand washes, face washes, sanitizers, shampoos, creams and gels, moisturizers, etc. These products are mainly sold offline through retail stores and markets across Telangana, as well as through ÷

the GEM (Government E-Marketplace) portal.  In the last fiscal (FY 2020-21), despite the market volatility and demand decline due to the ongoing pandemic, SYNNOVE, under Saka’s leadership, had managed to clock an enviable revenue of 50 lakhs!

Notably, Saka is an honorary member at Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI). She was also a part of Project Her&Now’s Entrepreneurship Support Programme in 2020. ‘Her&Now – Empowering Women Entrepreneurs’ is implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and in partnership with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), Government of India. In Telangana, the Project ran in partnership with WE Hub.

“Despite running the business for so many years, I never did get a chance to undertake any business-related training programme. I feel extremely grateful and lucky that I got to be a part of the Her&Now programme – which was an eye-opener for me in terms of acquiring new ideas for scaling my enterprise SYNNOVE. After completing the Her&Now programme, I am now looking forward to giving a more branding-oriented, corporate look to our products as well as to develop comprehensive digital footprints of the business in the near future,” says Saka Shailaja.

In the years to come, while growing her business to new heights, Saka also remains committed to empowering many more women and girls around her, along with a special focus on skilling, training and generating employment and income for women from the marginalized sections of the society, in a bid to help them become self-reliant.

A true exemplar of the indomitable entrepreneurial spirit and a flag-bearer of enabling “Aatmanirhar Bharat” – Saka Shailaja deserves to be a role model for all aspiring and existing women entrepreneurs of our country.