‘I’d skip a bus stop to save for biscuits’: SBI officer recalls her hardest years

“Whenever my son asked for a packet of biscuits, I would get off one stop early on the bus just so that I could save the money to be able to afford them,” Pratiksha Tondwalkar recalled of the years she spent as a young widow raising her son alone in Mumbai.

Tondwalkar was 20 when her husband, Sadashiv Kadu, a bookbinder at the State Bank of India, died in a road accident three years into their marriage. Left with a one-year-old son and no income, she took a job as a sweeper at SBI in 1985, earning around Rs 60 to Rs 65 a month cleaning toilets and sweeping the branch’s three floors before it opened each day at 8:30 am.

To make ends meet, she also worked at a shoe manufacturing unit, attaching soles to children’s shoes with her son beside her, before returning home to feed him, put him to sleep and study.

Watching educated officers and staff at the bank convinced her that education was the way forward. She enrolled in a night college in Mumbai’s Vikhroli area, cleared her Class 12 examinations, and later completed a degree in Psychology. Tondwalkar went on to rise through the ranks at SBI, eventually becoming an Assistant General Manager at the same institution where she once worked as a sweeper.