It is easy to spot Sethanibai Rathod’s house in Sindhol tanda. “Wo Pandrah Bachchon Ki Maa” (the mother of 15 children), they say and point towards the house.
Two days ago, Sethanibai abandoned her 15th girl child in the district hospital as she wanted a boy. Members of the district child welfare committee then took the baby to an orphanage run by the Bhalki Hiremath.
“My family and I wanted a boy baby, but we did not get one. That is why I left the baby in the hospital. If it was a boy, I would have brought him home happily. I had decided on this even before getting admitted,” she says.
“I knew she was my child and I was abandoning her; I felt bad. But I had no alternative,” she admits.
Sethanibai says she does not want the child back as she will not be able to take care of her. How then, would she afford to raise it if it were a boy? “God would have shown us some way,” she says.
Sethanibai works as a labourer in Bidar and her husband, Govardhan Rathod, is a labourer in Mumbai. He visits the tanda during festivals. They have no farmland and have built a hut in Sindhol tanda on a plot donated by the tanda leaders.
Of the couple’s 15 children, six died during infancy. Of the remaining nine girls, three are married. Two were wedded to cousins, while the local residents funded the marriage of the third. The remaining six have not gone to school. On Saturday, members of the child welfare committee visited the tanda. Shashidhar Kosambe, member, requested Sethanibai to send her children to the child labourer bridge school or a government residential school. But she refused. She said she would seek help from philanthropists to marry off her daughters.
