Six years ago Dr Jolapuram Umamaheswari walked away from her career as a scientist in Singapore.
"When I came back to India, I was jobless but I wanted to be my own boss," she says.
After some research she hit on silk farming, or sericulture. It involves feeding mulberry leaves to silkworms, harvesting their cocoons and extracting the silk fibres.
"Silk farming sits at a rare intersection of biology, precision, and business. It didn't feel like I was leaving science, it felt like I was applying it differently," she says.
However, raising silkworms on her farm in the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh proved to be a challenge.
