Ambedkar was born on April 14, 1891, in a hamlet called Ambawade in the Ratnagiri village of Bombay (now Maharashtra) province as the fourteenth child of Ramji Sakhpa, a military junior officer, and Bhimabai. Nine of the fourteen kids died in their childhood itself. When he was six, his mother too passed away. His father retired from service almost around the same time. And they shifted to a village where the father secured a small job and the little Bhim Rao had his primary education from a school at this village. When his father shifted to a town called Sattara for jobs, the boy had to go with him and had his high school education from a government school there. 

At school, he was not allowed to sit with other boys of higher castes, but had to sit on a jute sheet spread on the floor. Nor was he permitted to learn Sanskrit, which he learned up later privately. He was not even permitted to use the public well and the public roads that the other boys used. Some of the teachers did not even touch him or look at his face. All this was because he was from a lowly caste, an untouchable one. Little Bhim Rao kept this shame in his mind and it burned there all through his extra-ordinary life.