Sindhutai Sapakal

Founder

Sindhutai Sapakal is the founder of Sanmati Bal Niketan [1], an Indian non-profit working on orphans & child care and women & children from Pune.

Sindhu Shrihari Sapkal (14 November 1948 – 4 January 2022), universally known as Sindhutai and often transliterated Sapakal, was an Indian social worker who raised orphaned and abandoned children in Maharashtra. She founded a series of children's homes, among them Sanmati Bal Niketan at Manjri in Hadapsar, Pune, and was widely called Mai, or mother.

She was appointed to the Padma Shri in 2021 in the social work category, and over her lifetime received several hundred awards, the prize money from which she used to buy land for her homes.

Early life

Sapkal was born on 14 November 1948 at Pipri Meghe in Wardha district, Maharashtra, into a cattle-herding family. An unwanted child, she was called Chindhi, meaning a piece of torn cloth. Poverty and domestic responsibilities ended her schooling after the fourth standard. At about twelve she was married to Shrihari Sapkal, a man some twenty years her senior. At the age of twenty she was forced out of her marital home and left to fend for herself and an infant daughter.

Career

After moving to Chikhaldara in the Amravati district, Sapkal began taking in abandoned children she encountered while begging on railway platforms. To remove any distinction between her own child and those she had adopted, she gave her biological daughter into the care of the Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai trust in Pune. She went on to raise more than a thousand children.

She also worked on the rehabilitation of Adivasi villagers displaced by the creation of a tiger reserve at Chikhaldara, and successfully pressed the government, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for compensation for tribal villagers injured by wildlife.

The institutions she established include Sanmati Bal Niketan at Manjri, Pune; Mamata Bal Sadan at Kumbharvalan, founded in 1994; the Savitribai Phule girls' hostel at Chikhaldara; Abhiman Bal Bhavan at Wardha; Gangadharbaba Chhatralaya at Shirdi; and the Mother Global Foundation in Pune. Her life was the subject of the 2010 Marathi film Mee Sindhutai Sapkal.

She died of a heart attack in Pune on 4 January 2022, aged 73.

Recognition

Sapkal was awarded the Padma Shri in 2021. Her other honours include the Ahilyabai Holkar Award (2010), the Real Heroes Award and the COEP Gaurav Puraskar (2012), the Mother Teresa Award for Social Justice (2013), the Ahmadiyya Muslim Peace Prize (2014), an honorary doctorate and a Social Worker of the Year award (2016), and the Nari Shakti Puraskar (2017). Accounts published at her death put the total number of awards she received in the hundreds.[2][3][4]

Sanmati Bal Niketan

Sanmati Bal Niketan at Manjari near Pune is the flagship children's home of Saptasindhu Mahila Adhar Balsangopan and Shikshan Sanstha, the NGO founded by Padma Shri Sindhutai Sapkal, who raised more than 1,200 orphaned children before her death in 2022. Her daughter Mamata Sapkal continues the mission, providing shelter, food, education and family to orphaned and abandoned children.

Sanmati Bal Niketan reports the following, on its own site: