Sindhutai Sapkal

Sindhutai Sapkal was born in 1948 in a village in Wardha district, Maharashtra, to a family of cowherds who called her Chindhi, meaning a torn scrap of cloth, because a daughter was not wanted. At twelve she was married to a man of about thirty and went to live in his village to fetch water, gather cow dung and bear children.

At twenty, pregnant with her fourth child, she fell foul of a local landlord after complaining that village women were being cheated over the dung they collected. Her husband, told she had been unfaithful, beat her and threw her out. She gave birth to a daughter that night in a cowshed and walked to her mother's house, where she was turned away.

For years she lived on railway platforms and in cremation grounds, singing devotional songs for scraps and sharing whatever she got with the orphaned children who slept there too. She found she could not leave them. She began to beg for them as a group, and eventually to find them rooms, then schools. To avoid favouring her own child she placed her daughter in the care of a trust in Pune.

By the time she died in 2022 she had raised, by her own reckoning, more than a thousand children and ran several homes. Her husband, old and destitute, came to her in later years and she took him in, she said, as her eldest child. She received the Padma Shri in 2021.