A mother of thousands and a daughter of thousands play the numbers game.
The amazing small stories of social worker Sindhutai Sapkal and sarpanch Bhakti Sharma.

I’m rarely moved to tears. However, on the morning of 16th October, 2019, I sat there in the audience of a ‘women empowerment’ session conducted by Gujarat Employer’s Organisation and sobbed my heart out. The session called ‘Shakti’ was three hours long and had only two women speakers.
One, was the more famous, mother of ‘orphans’ Sindhutai Sapkal, a lady who after being thrown out of her home in her ninth month of pregnancy gave birth to her child in a cow-shed where she was compelled to cut off the umbilical cord on her own. A woman who begged at railway stations to feed herself and her infant while they slept at nights in the ‘safety’ of graveyards. A woman, who in spite of her million troubles decided to adopt 1400 orphans, and give them the most important thing they needed to survive–love.

Sindhutai has already received 750 awards, she’s been facilitated by 4 presidents and she recently appeared on Kaun Banega Crorepati, where we all knew it wasn’t Bachchan who was the star. Draped in her pink cotton saree, Sindhutai sat there like a grandmother we were all familiar with, looking at us lovingly and surprising us more than a few times with her crazy sense of humor.
However, she wasn’t the first one to take the mic. She sweetly asked the second guest Bhakti Sharma to speak before her. Bhakti was humbled and she accepted. The audience who were waiting to hear a powerful and wonderful woman like Sindhutai speak, didn’t have to wait. Here was another powerful and dedicated woman who inspired and moved us.
Most of the room filled with young students, officegoers, entrepreneurs, homemakers, and businesswomen got intrigued when she confidently spoke in Hinglish. A sarpanch of a village speaking to us in our slanguage! Where was the saree and the matronly attitude? Here was a clearly urban young woman, dressed in kurta and jeans, speaking about the plight of farmers and their families like they were her buddies back home. It felt unreal. How could a young woman head the panchayat of Barkhedi on the outskirts of Bhopal after being educated abroad? How could this anomaly manage and govern 4 villages consisting of 2500 people?

Sharma engaged us for more than an hour, sharing with us a presentation she recently did at the UN where she represented India as a national youth leader. The presentation contained many statistics that pointed to the progress in her villages. From the number of community halls she helped build (i.e. zero to three), the positive gender ratio towards women (there are around 41 more women than the 778 men) or how there hasn’t been any crime committed since the time she took over. They were all peppered with sweet and bitter anecdotes about life in the villages. She passionately reminded us that the audience members were already empowered, and she desperately wanted to give voice to the voiceless, the ones who don’t feature in our list of national problems. They were the ones who still wonder where their next meal is going to come from. Her tone would fluctuate from informative to infuriated when she pondered on the pathetic state of the agricultural families, whose needs should be the priority of every government and citizen. Usually, the fruit of their labour goes into our stomachs, and not theirs.
I sunk into my seat teary-eyed and overwhelmed with these two extraordinary women. But if you think these three gut-wrenching hours were a pity-party, you could not be more wrong. Sharma kept entertaining us with moments in her career where she made her detractors retract their statement. Like the time a member of the administration asked if she was the Sarpanch’s daughter or sister. She pointed out to the judgemental bureaucrat that there was no man standing beside her so the sarpanch they were looking for was indeed her. Sindhutai, on the other hand, would have us in splits, as she recalled how the original bhootni of the graveyard where she slept was no one but her. She also jokingly called her 30-year-old husband, who she was wedded to at the age of 10, a ‘khatarnak model’. To have a sense of humor about these terrible situations requires strength that we could only hope to acquire in our lives. I don’t think I have ever been so proud of two complete strangers. It gives me tremendous hope to know that such humans do exist. Women who take a stand for others, when there is usually no one to take a stand for them.

But what gives them so much courage? Why were they motivated to do something for others, when they could have just focussed on their own comforts and needs?
And that’s when it hit me.
It was all about numbers. And they weren’t the big numbers like you read in the news. 5000 cr deficit. 6000 cr scam. 32000 cr wealth. These were much smaller. But more than enough to the two women they mattered to. And you intrinsically knew this, because of how proudly they spoke about every single digit in their respective speeches.
Like 1. The one orphan Sindhutai picked up from a dead beggar’s arms. She adopted him and educated him to make him a lawyer. He stood next to her at the session while a few hundred of us gave them a standing ovation.
Or 17. The number of handpumps distributed in the villages that Sharma runs. There were 8 when she took over.
Or 4. The number of beggars that Sindhutai shared her food with one night when she herself had little to eat.
Or 3. The number of skill development centers started by Sharma, to skill hundreds of women and give them a reliable source of income.
Or 350. The number of non-milking cows Sindhutai adopted apart from her 1400 orphan children. These cows had no one looking after them, after all, their job to feed a population was over.
Or 3. The number of minutes it takes to reach Barkhedi from the state highway, as opposed to 30 when there was no road.
Or zero. The number of government grants that Sindhutai has received for her social work, while she continues to run her home on private donations. She’s now 70 years old and still has no qualms about asking for money that she desperately needs to help save children from a life of hopelessness and poverty.
No number was too big. Yet no number is ever small. Sindhutai Sapkal and Bhakti Sharma in 3 hours showed us that you have to start somewhere if you want to achieve any kind of numbers. Both the ladies don’t worry about what would come next. They don’t have a clear target in mind. But they showed us, that it usually starts with 1 — the number of people you need to believe in to fight each battle.
Starting with ourselves.
If you want to donate or learn more about Sindhutai’s efforts > https://www.sindhutaisapakal.org/
If you want to test a start-up at a grassroots level that skills or benefits rural India, present your ideas to Bhakti Sharma > https://twitter.com/sarpanchbhakti?lang=en
