It was 250 rupees, which in exchange is 2.75 euros, the price they paid for the lottery ticket. They bought it halfway, among 11 women who work collecting the non-biodegradable waste left in the containers by the families of Parappanangadi, a city of 70,000 inhabitants in the state of Kerala, in southern India. That 250 rupees is exactly the daily salary they earn, which comes from the monthly tax that households pay for cleaning.
The group, which bought the ticket in June, is made up of veteran women in their 70s, and other young women in their twenties. With their salary they barely made ends meet, and many had to face debts they had contracted to be able to pay for their children’s education and support their families.
But their destiny changed radically last week, when they discovered that they had won the jackpot: 100 million rupees (more than one million euros). One of the BBC’s correspondents in India went looking for her and has spoken to the lucky ones.
“I’m still in shock. We had to check with several people to make sure we had made all that money and still couldn’t believe it. We all come from very poor families with a lot of debt,” says Radha, 49, who says that it is not the first time that they have been lucky in the lottery.
“Once, we won a prize of 1,000 rupees and we shared it,” he says. Radha lent Rs 12.5 to one of her classmates, Kuttimalu (72), who did not have enough money to contribute to the fund.
After paying the government taxes, the group will receive clean 63 million rupees, around 700,000 euros. The women found out they had won a day after the drawing, when one of them asked her husband to check the results.
Baby, 62, assures the BBC that she is going to allocate the money to build a house because hers was destroyed by severe floods that hit Kerala in 2018. Bindu (50 years old), another of the winners, will also invest her part to buy a house and pay for her daughter’s studies.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
