Mumbai: Two Indian women on death row for murdering five children have lodged a last-ditch appeal after the president rejected their mercy plea, clearing the way for them to become the first women executed in post-independence India.

The Kolhapur sisters — Renuka Kiran Shinde and Seema Mohan Gavit — were sentenced to death for kidnapping 13 children and killing five of them.

Both are now awaiting hanging in Pune’s Yerawada Central Prison after the rejection of their mercy petition by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, on July 7.

The buffer period, the time taken by the Maharashtra Home Department to inform the convicts, their relatives, the legal remedial cell of the Supreme Court and the Kolhapur district court about the rejection of the sisters’ mercy petition ended on Saturday.

They were sentenced to death by a lower court in June 2001.

It would only be a matter of time when the two are sent to the gallows for the grisly crime that they committed iin cahoots with their mother Anjanbai Gavit — they kidnapped the children and forced them to beg or assist them in thefts.

When the children became unproductive or unresponsive, the sisters and their mother killed them ruthlessly.

Anjanbai died during the trial in 1996 whilst Renuka’s husband Kiran Shinde turned approver and was acquitted. Renuka is now in her late forties and Seema her late thirties.

The story of their vicious crimes not only shocked people following their case but even left the lower court, Bombay High Court, Supreme Court and the President of India alarmed by the way the women kidnapped and killed executed their crimes without a tinge of feeling for the little ones — all aged between one and five.

From being petty criminals, picking wallets, they moved on to become kidnappers and child killers. Their trail of slaughter began in March 1991.

The kidnapped children were often taken to crowded places, especially temples, where one of the women would try to pick people’s belongings.

In one instance, Seema, who was carrying a kidnapped child, was caught while picking the purse of a devotee who thrashed her. Anjanbai intervened and all of a sudden took the child from her daughter’s arms and threw him on the ground.

As a result, one-year-old Santosh, who the trio had kidnapped from a beggar in Kolhapur, sustained head injuries. Seeing a bleeding child, the crowd was distracted and instead of handing over Seema to the police, asked her to rush the child to the hospital.

Even as they went scot-free, they managed to pick three wallets of passengers at the local bus stand. When Santosh started crying on their way back, Anjanbai gagged the bleeding infant and banged his head on an iron bar repeatedly till he died. She then dumped the body near an old autorickshaw heap.

This was the first in a series of kidnappings and murders that made the Supreme Court, in its August 31, 2006 confirmation of the verdict, state: “We find no mitigating circumstances in favour of the appellants except for the fact they are women. The nature of the crime and systemic way in which each child was kidnapped and killed demonstrates the depravity of the mind of the appellants.

“They cleverly executed plans of kidnapping the children and the moment they were no longer useful, they killed them and threw the dead body at some deserted place. The appellants had been a menace to society and people in the locality were horrified and could not send their children even to schools.”

The apex court stated the crimes were committed casually, least bothering about their lives or agony of their parents.