Why I started 'Anti Bullying Squad' and pitched for an app

I WAS around 10 when I started the ‘Anti Bullying Squad’, an impact enterprise which aims to reduce bullying in schools and campuses by educating young people about the issue, providing counselling to those impacted by it, and encouraging incident reporting.

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What inspired me to start the enterprise was an incident in which I witnessed a six-year-old girl getting bullied. I guess I could say that incident changed my life, and gave me a sense of purpose. It is when I decided to embark on this anti-bullying mission.

Initially, when I had just begun my enterprise in 2018, I started by going to different schools and campuses and taking sessions with students on bullying. However, the pandemic forbid that. Everything moved online, and so did I. I decided to quickly adapt by taking online seminars on bullying and cyberbullying. I took sessions with several schools and NGOs. I did several Instagram Lives, podcasts, online interviews and exploited social media to reach out to as many kids as I could.

Something I noticed was that students were able to open up way better online than offline because nobody was physically present to judge them. People were more forthcoming in sharing their bullying incidents with their cameras switched off. They just wanted to be heard. During one of these sessions, a 10-year-old boy shared his bullying experience. He told me that he used to get slapped and kicked on his shin in the school bus by his seniors every day. In fact, he was thankful to the pandemic for his school closure. It had become so painful that his right shin had been totally bruised. When he tried to talk to his parents about it, they just brushed it aside as a part of growing up. He had come to a point of having suicidal thoughts as he just couldn’t take it anymore and even his own parents weren’t supporting him. He felt helpless.

Another girl shared her experience from when she got cyberbullied. She spoke about how somebody she knew, and was very close to, created an online group and leaked personal information about her identity. Because of this, she started getting homophobic comments and messages and these made her extremely conscious and embarrassed. She mentioned that she was scared that her friends would betray her and started to feel lonely. Moreover, she stopped feeling comfortable in her identity.

Not just young kids, but also those slightly older shared their past experiences. One lady told me that both her teachers and peers used to pick on her skin colour and body type, calling her names like ‘Kali’or ‘Moti’. And the worst part was that she didn’t even realise that was bullying. She thought she deserved to be treated that way, when, in fact, no one does.

Students would reach out to me after sessions as well. In fact, my email and Instagram DMs (direct messages) were full of personal messages of people sharing their bullying experiences. Most of them didn’t even ask for any help, all they did was vent out and talk because they needed someone to listen.

These sessions and listening to the numerous experiences made me realise I have to work on creating a much bigger impact. I have to reach out to students on a larger scale. In order to do that, I decided to shift from live online sessions to a self-paced online programme of one hour that would talk about all aspects of bullying from the perspectives of the key participants. Through this, I sincerely hope I was able to educate and impact thousands of children and adults. I also collaborated with one of India’s largest independent youth volunteer non-profit organisations, Bhumi, for a seminar on bullying and cyberbullying.

Over the course of three years of working on this cause, one thing I can say surely works — whatever is reported can be resolved. Then an idea struck me of building a mobile app around the current education infrastructure, so that all the bullying problems can be resolved. I worked on creating ‘Kavach’, an incident-reporting mobile app through which any child or parent can report bullying anonymously. These incidents can be viewed by the school as well, and they can take appropriate action to sort them out. It also provides a self-paced training programme, ‘Bullying Deep Dive’, consisting of 10 short videos to educate children about various aspects of bullying. The application also acts as a deterrent.

I presented the idea and got funded on the television reality show ‘Shark Tank India’ for the app. This was a huge milestone as I was the youngest contestant. I have also reached out to school counsellors and they have welcomed the idea of this app, especially the analysis feature, that allows the schools to view reports on patterns and trends of bullying in their institutions.

I have also been invited by the Ministry of Culture to be a part of the song ‘Mauka Hai’ along with 40 ‘youth icons’ to inspire the youth to build a stronger nation together.

It has been a great 2021 and I get a feeling that this is just the beginning. 2022 has a lot of work ahead for me.