Owing to her dad’s frequent job re-location, Ankita has had a fairly uprooted upbringing. She stayed in Indonesia for the first eight years of her life. Subsequently, she stayed in Karnataka, Abu Dhabi, Vijayawada and Pune for brief periods of time. She believes this exposure to different cultural environments has been a boon to her. Ankita is a product design graduate. She says that her stint with design opened many horizons. As a sheltered 18-year old who entered college, design branched out her linear thinking. Today, she affirms that design thinking has the ability to change the world. A large number of her classroom projects have revolved around making people’s lives better. One particular project was aimed at tackling the problems faced by migrant construction workers. While doing on-ground research, she and her team realised there are several loopholes in the current system. One of the main drawbacks being, the workers do not know the government schemes that are in place for them. In short, they do not know the rights they are entitled to. She and her team went on to prototyping and validating a few solutions. She believes that the Young India Fellowship will give her an opportunity to work on many more such pressing issues.
