There is a version of this story where I tell you about leaving a comfortable life abroad to come back and build for India. That story is true, but it is not the point.
The point is my father.
I spent fifteen years building AI systems that work at scale, in energy, telecom and mining, in the US and in France. Home kept calling. I wanted to use what I had learned for my own people, and public safety is where I landed. It touches more lives, more often, than anything else I could have worked on.
Then I understood why that answer had felt so obvious.
Through all my working years in the NCR, my father called. Before I left the house: which route are you taking today. When I reached: send me a message. When it ran late: stay on the line, I will talk to you until you are inside. He did the same for my sister, every day, for years. He was not an anxious man. He was quietly running the same calculation that every woman in this country ends up running for herself, so that we would not have to carry it alone.
That is what safety actually looks like. Someone who knows where you are. Someone who notices when something is off. Someone who is already there, before anything happens.
Fear is universal. Danger is universal. The calculations are universal. Which route, what time, who to text, whether to pretend you are on a call so the street feels less empty. Every woman runs them, in a village in Rajasthan, in a hospital in Kolkata after a 36-hour shift, walking to her car at night anywhere in the world.
Safety is not universal. Somewhere along the way it became a privilege, something you get if you can afford the cab instead of the bus, the safer neighbourhood, the person who waits up for you. I fundamentally disagree with that.
Not every woman has my father on the other end of the phone. Sakhi is him, at scale. What he did out of love, Sakhi does with AI, for millions of women: reading the route before she takes it, noticing when the pattern breaks, checking in at the right moment, and staying with her until she is home.
Safety is not a luxury. It is not a privilege. It is a right. Sakhi exists because we have treated it as negotiable for far too long.
