The Mother of Orphans

Abandoned and pregnant at twenty, she turned her own suffering into a lifelong home for hundreds of orphaned children who called her Mai — Mother.

Sindhutai Sapkal was born in 1948 into a poor family in Wardha district, Maharashtra, where being an unwanted girl child earned her the nickname Chindhi, meaning a torn piece of cloth. Married young and later cast out of her home while pregnant, she gave birth in a cow shed and survived by begging on railway platforms and singing for food.

In those desperate years she noticed how many children had been abandoned and left to fend for themselves, just as she had been. Rather than turn away, she began gathering them, sharing whatever little she had, and slowly built a family of orphaned children who came to know her simply as Mai.

Over the decades she raised and educated well over a thousand children, establishing ashrams to shelter them. Many of the children she brought up went on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers and social workers, and they in turn continued her mission of caring for the abandoned.

In 2021 the Government of India honoured her with the Padma Shri for her decades of social work. Sindhutai Sapkal died in Pune on 4 January 2022, leaving behind an extended family of the children she had gathered — a testament to a woman who answered her own abandonment with boundless mothering.