Sindhutai Sapkal was married at the age of twelve, as was common in her rural Maharashtra community at the time, and years later, while pregnant, was thrown out of her marital home by her husband over a false accusation, left with nowhere to go and no support from her own family, who considered her return shameful.
She gave birth alone near a cattle shed shortly afterward, and in the years that followed lived in extreme poverty, at times begging and singing at railway stations to survive, sending her own daughter to an orphanage since she could not reliably feed her, while she herself lived largely on the street.
During this period, she began encountering other abandoned and orphaned children living in similarly desperate conditions, and rather than focusing solely on her own survival, she started taking them in one by one, sharing whatever little food or shelter she managed to find each day, gradually building an informal network of care around herself.
Over the following decades, this grew into a formal set of orphanages under her leadership, and she became known across India as 'Mother of Orphans,' having raised well over a thousand children by the end of her life, alongside her own biological daughter, whom she eventually reunited with and supported through medical school.