SINDHUTAI SAPKAL(MOTHER OF ORPHANS)

                  Sindhutai Sapkal,known as the "Mother of Orphans",is an Indian social worker and social activist.Sindhutai Sapkal was born on 14 November 1948 at Pimpri Meghe village in Wardha district Maharashtra to Abhimanji Sathe, a cowherd by profession. Being an unwanted child, she was referred to as Chindhi her father was keen on educating Sindhutai, much against the wishes of her mother.Abject poverty, family responsibilities and an early marriage forced her to quit formal education after she successfully passed the 4th standard.

          At the age of ten, she was married to Shrihari Sapkal alias Harbaji, a 30-year-old cowherd from Navargaon village in Wardha District. She bore three sons by the time she turned twenty. She put up a successful agitation against a local strongman who was fleecing the villagers on collection of dried cow dung used as fuel in India and selling it in collusion with forest department, without paying anything to the villagers..Her agitation brought the district collector to her village and on realising she was right, he passed an order which the strongman did not like.She gave birth to a baby girl on 14 October 1973 in a cow shelter outside their house that night, all by herself and walked several kilometres away to her mother's place. Her mother refused to shelter her. She had to set aside the thought of suicide and started begging on railway platforms for food. In the process, she realised that there were so many children abandoned by their parents and she adopted them as her own and started begging even more vigorously to feed them. She decided to become a mother to anyone and everyone who came across to her as an orphan. She later donated her biological child to the trust Shrimant Dagdu Sheth Halwai, Pune, only to eliminate the feeling of partiality between her daughter and the adopted ones.

                 She has devoted her entire life to orphans. As a result, she is fondly called 'Mai'(mother). She has nurtured over 1,050 orphaned children. As of today, she has a grand family of 207 sons-in-law, thirty-six daughters-in-law, and over a thousand grandchildren.At the age of 80, her husband came back to her apologetically. She accepted him as her child stating she is only a mother now! If you visit her ashram, she proudly and very affectionately introduces him as her oldest child! In person, she comes across as an unlimited source of energy and very powerful inspiration, with absolutely no negative emotions or blaming anybody.