Nights in a Cemetery, Then Mother to Thousands

Sindhutai Sapkal was born into a family of cattle herders in the Wardha district of Maharashtra. Her father wanted her to study, but poverty and an early marriage ended her schooling after the fourth grade. At 12 she was married to a man about twenty years her senior.

Around the age of 20, when she was nine months pregnant, her husband, Sreehari Sapkal, sent her out to a cattle shed. According to Onmanorama, this followed her opposition to corruption by local landlords and forest officials. She gave birth to a daughter there, alone, cutting the umbilical cord with a stone. The villagers of Pimpri-Mogha would not take her in, and her own mother shut the door on her.

With her newborn she spent nights at a cemetery and begged for food. She begged on trains and made rotis from discarded grain, cooking them on leftover embers. The article says she twice attempted to end her life, at Malkapur railway station and at a cliff near Amravati, and that on both occasions a meal or a conversation with someone turned her back.

She began sharing what food she had with hungry children on the streets, and people started calling her Thai (sister) and Mai (mother). She placed her daughter, then five, with a children's trust in Pune, and adopted a boy named Deepak whom she found by railway tracks. After about fifteen years of work with tribal communities near Amravati, she moved to Pune with Deepak and sixteen adopted children and founded Mamata Balasadan, her first children's home.

By 2021 she had about 1,500 adopted children and ran six homes. Many of them had married and some had become doctors, engineers and lawyers. She received more than 750 awards, including the Padma Shri. In 2013, when the Maharashtra government honoured her in her old village, her husband asked her forgiveness; she took him in as her eldest son and cared for him until he died in 2018.