Meet the Couple Who Faced Attacks & Evictions To Raise 650 HIV-Positive Children as Their Own

Late one morning in 2007, the blood bank at the District Hospital in Beed carried the usual hush of people waiting for their turn. Pathology technician Datta Bargaje was sorting through reports when a woman stormed in with a child on her hip and another clinging to her hand. Her saree was creased with travel, her hair tangled, her voice raw with anger and fear.

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She announced, almost as if defending herself from an unseen accusation, that she had AIDS. Her husband had died of it. The child in her arms was HIV-positive. Everything in her life had folded inwards, and she stood there unable to hold up the weight anymore.

Datta walked to her quietly and asked what she needed. In that moment, something softened. “I washed her face and counselled her,” he recalls. “I brought her and the children to my quarter.”

His wife, Sandhya, took over with the instinct of someone who recognises a person in need before any words are spoken. She bathed the woman, dressed her in a clean saree, and served food to her and the children. As the two little boys, Vishal and Yogesh, ran around the courtyard with the Bargaje children, their mother watched them with an expression that flickered between relief and sorrow.

She left them there when she walked back to the lonely cottage she lived in. It was perhaps the only moment in many years when she felt her children were safe.

For Datta and Sandhya, that day was not just an encounter with a stranger. It was a mirror held up to the way society treated people living with HIV. It revealed how fear could push families apart, how shame could swallow every remaining support, and how easily children could become collateral in battles they never asked for.

Something shifted inside them, and they decided they could no longer look away.

Planting the first seed of a home

Months earlier, on 1 December 2006, the couple had already taken one step in the direction their lives were heading. They had started the Infant India Trust from their government quarter. They invited doctors, social workers, Rotary members and friends. They even organised a blood donation camp where Sandhya and Datta’s sister donated blood.

The children who found their way to their door came from some of the most vulnerable corners of Maharashtra. Migrant workers. Tribal families. Sugarcane labourers. Homes where illness had arrived silently and left devastation behind. Word spread quickly that an HIV-negative couple was offering shelter to HIV-positive children. Soon, people began leaving children outside the Bargajes’ door, sometimes at dawn, sometimes long after sundown.

By mid-2008, the number of children had grown to seven or eight. Complaints from neighbours followed. Authorities knocked on the door with a notice to vacate the quarter. It became clear that while their intention was embraced by the children, it was not welcomed by the neighbourhood.

So Datta and Sandhya packed their few belongings, gathered the children, and began looking for a place the world would not push them out of.

Searching for a place where nobody would be asked to leave

Help came first from a small-scale businessman, Alijah Patel, who offered his gas cylinder warehouse in 2008. Datta and Sandhya moved in with seventeen children. They hoped this would give them a brief pause to breathe and settle. But soon, familiar objections returned. People living nearby questioned them, pressured them, and eventually made it clear they were not wanted.

They moved again, this time to an unused hall in an agricultural field offered by a priest. There were no toilets, so Datta built two from scratch. He watched over the boys, Sandhya looked after the girls, and each day unfolded with hope tangled with fear. When the children faced public humiliation yet again, Datta knew the hall would not become a home.

After months of searching, his journey brought him to a barren landscape near the Bindusara Dam. A massive basalt rock stood there, rising more than 300 feet into the air. It had no road, no electricity and no water. There were no neighbours to object, no narrow lanes to whisper disapproval. There was only silence and stone, and a sense of space where the children might be allowed to simply live.

“I sold my Indica car, a 2,000 square foot plot in Kaij and some of Sandhya’s gold ornaments to buy two acres of land for Rs 10.5 lakh,” Datta says. “I named the rock Anandgram Rock.”

Twenty-five children now lived with them. The rock asked for strength every day. The children often fell sick with stomach aches, vomiting and fevers. Datta and Sandhya carried them down the slope in a makeshift cradle at night, walked almost half a kilometre to find a rickshaw, and travelled fifteen kilometres to Civil Hospital.

But even on this harsh terrain, life began to weave itself together. Sandhya cooked meals with the help of the older girls. The boys handled small chores. Datta’s 81-year-old mother bathed the children with the tenderness of a grandmother who refuses to draw lines between family and strangers. People started arriving with old clothes, vegetables and grains on birthdays, anniversaries or in memory of loved ones no longer alive.

Meals were simple. Boiled rice, pulses, vegetables and jowar and bajra flatbreads. But they were shared together, and that was enough to make the place feel like a home in the making.

The long fight to enter a classroom

Education often becomes the door to a different kind of life, and Datta believed the children deserved that chance. When he tried to enrol them at the Zila Parishad High School in Pali, protests erupted. People attacked him. He was taken to Civil Hospital. FIRs followed. Parents said they did not want HIV-positive children studying near their own.

District AIDS Control officers and senior doctors from Civil Hospital met the villagers and spoke to them about HIV transmission. Only then were the children admitted.

But acceptance did not arrive with admission slips.

The children were made to sit on the ground outside the classroom. Later, they were moved to a computer hall that had never been used for teaching. One teacher taught them at intervals. During morning assemblies, they stood in the last row. Midday meals were handed to them from a distance. They were not allowed to drink from the same taps.

“They were known as the Children of Infant,” Datta says. “It went on for years. People slowly understood when they saw my mother, wife, three children and me living together with these kids without any infection.”

Understanding took nearly eight years. But it came, and the children stayed in school.

Medicine, miles and a protest that changed access

Every month, Datta travelled 130 kilometres to Ambajogai’s Medical College for ART medicines. The long bus rides made the children nauseous. Conductors were irritated by the stops. Datta eventually bought a second-hand Omni van and turned it into a small ambulance.

But the distances remained brutal. Beginning in late 2008, the family organised repeated demonstrations asking for ART medicines in Beed itself. Datta wrote to the Maharashtra Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. After sustained pressure, MSACS and NACO approved a medicine substation at the District Hospital in 2010. It became functional later that year.

It changed the rhythm of their lives. Children no longer spent entire days travelling for medicines.

Bidding farewell with dignity

HIV-positive individuals are buried instead of cremated. But the villagers refused to allow HIV-positive bodies to be buried in the public ground. Once again, the rock became the only place where the children would not be turned away.

“I created a burial ground on one corner of our land and named it Vedna Dafanbhumi,” Datta says. “On each tomb, a sapling was planted. From 2006 to 2022, eighteen children died. The mortality rate is nil now.”

Funerals often took place at two in the morning so the other children did not witness the trauma. Datta remembers villagers arriving with bodies on bullock carts, lowering them to the ground without coming too close.

“I buried infected adults on numerous occasions. They dropped the body from a distance. I buried them after wrapping them with salt,” he says.

On that rock, even grief found a place to rest.

Choosing the children over the comfort of a stable job

Datta’s responsibilities meant constant hospital visits, school issues, medical emergencies and daily caregiving. He was transferred to Nanded, and with no volunteers to help run the shelter, he resigned in 2010. Sandhya had left her job earlier when they shifted to Beed. She found strength in the teachings of Gandhiji and Vinoba Bhave, and she held the emotional threads of the home together.

By then, forty-eight children lived at Anandgram. Several HIV-positive widows, abandoned after their husbands’ deaths, arrived seeking shelter. Some stayed, recovered, and chose to help raise the children.

Today, fifteen widows live and work at Anandgram. They cook meals, accompany children to hospitals and receive medical care themselves.

Voices that keep the home alive

Walk through the corridors of Anandgram today and you will find stories tucked into corners, spoken in gentle conversations or remembered in passing moments. Nisha, now 23, often sits with the younger children during their evening study sessions. She lost both parents to HIV and was abandoned by relatives who kept her utensils and bedding in a separate storeroom. The day she and her sisters were brought to Anandgram in 2016, she carried fear heavier than her luggage.

She remembers her first meal there. Everyone sat together. No separate plates. No separate glasses. The simple act felt like belonging. She studied hard, completed her ANM course in 2022 and now works as a nurse with Datta’s son and daughter-in-law. “With proper care, my sisters recovered. Their health is absolutely normal,” she says.

In the kitchen, the aroma of evening tea often mingles with laughter. Much of it comes from Suman, who arrived fourteen years ago after a lifetime of isolation. Locked in a room by her own family after she became HIV-positive, she had forgotten what companionship felt like. At Anandgram, she found a space where she could cook, laugh, and use her nursing skills to comfort children during hospital visits. “Children refer to me as sister,” she says with pride.

At the District Hospital in Beed, Nursing Superintendent Rama Giri speaks of Datta with admiration. She has known him for eighteen years. “I have never seen a person having every luxury but shunning it for the service of these destitute children,” she says. She still remembers the early years when he arrived with five or six children, the number growing each time.

Inside the health room at Anandgram, Datta’s son, Dr Pruthviraj, reviews charts with a calm patience that comes from growing up in this world. He monitors CD4 counts, adjusts diets and manages medicines. He remembers a moment from childhood that shaped him. Parvati, the same woman who walked into the blood bank years ago, once had wounds with maggots. “I saw Vishal removing maggots from her arms. I cannot forget that service,” he says.

These voices turn Anandgram from a shelter into a community. They hold stories of survival, kindness, anger, laughter and hope. Together, they shape a place where people rebuild their lives brick by brick.

A generation raised on a rock

More than 650 HIV-positive children have grown up on that basalt rock. Many work today as mechanics, stewards, nurses or pharmacists. Some are in training, some in hospitals, some in companies like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland. Sixty girls began new chapters through marriages arranged under the Kanyadaan Project. With the right treatment, 28 HIV-negative children were born to HIV-positive couples. The first was Shivprasad, son of Vishal.

Eighteen HIV-negative orphans also call Anandgram home.

What began as one couple opening the door of their quarter has grown into a community rooted in care. The rock that once stood barren now carries stories of children who stayed alive, grew up, studied, fell sick, healed, and found work. It carries stories of women who arrived abandoned and found purpose. It carries the weight of grief and the lightness of daily laughter.

Most of all, it stands as proof that compassion can carve out life, dignity and possibility even on the harshest rock.