Bengaluru, March 30, 2026: Earlier this month at our event ‘Winspiration: A Page of Her Life’, the format borrowed from an unusual idea: the human library. Instead of panel discussions and presentations, participants could “borrow” a person, a “human book”, and sit down for an intimate conversation. The stories that unfolded were lived experiences, full of resilience and hard-won insight.

Two of those human books, Bina Rani and Shreya Krishnan, spoke about radically different kinds of work: one fighting child trafficking in rural India, the other confronting gender bias in technology and leadership. Yet their stories revealed a common theme: the long, patient work of dismantling systems that harm women and girls.

For Bina Rani, the turning point came on a street she thought she already knew well.

Rani grew up in Bengaluru in difficult circumstances. When both her parents died, she was just eleven years old. “We had nothing,” she recalled. “No food for days sometimes.”

Seven children were suddenly left to fend for themselves. The eldest was sixteen; their brother, only a little older, was trying to make sense of a future that had abruptly collapsed. “At one point,” Rani recalled, “my brother said the only way to deal with this was probably to sell the sisters into prostitution because there was no other way for us to survive. I think he meant it jokingly. But when you’re a child in that situation, you don’t know if it’s really a joke.”

Determined to continue studying, she stood outside her school principal’s office every morning, insisting she needed a scholarship until, finally, the principal relented.

Years later, after finishing her education and securing a stable job at a bank on MG Road, Rani believed she had finally escaped the precariousness of her childhood. But a friend working with an NGO asked her to step outside her routine and see something she had overlooked.

Together they walked down to the street outside her office building, where Rani encountered four girls, the youngest barely six years old, being exploited for sex. One of them clung to her legs and begged: “Please take me home. I cannot do this anymore.”

“I still remember her face,” Rani said. “Her name was Lakshmi.”

The encounter shattered the protective distance Rani had built around her own survival. “I realised that my child, if I had one, would be safe because I had a job,” she said. “But what about this child?”

That question became the foundation of her life’s work.

For years, Rani worked on rescuing trafficked children from brothels. The experiences were often harrowing.

In one raid, a team waited in a building suspected of hiding trafficked girls. Traffickers insisted there was no one inside. Only after twenty minutes, when oxygen began to run low in the cramped hiding spaces, did faint scratching sounds reveal the truth. When rescuers finally broke through, they discovered 120 girls hidden in a rooftop water tank. The youngest was four years old.

Moments like these made Rani question the limits of rescue alone.

“The more you rescue, the more they appear,” she said. Trafficking, she realised, was embedded in poverty, migration, caste discrimination and generational cycles of exploitation.

Today, through her organisation iPartner India, Rani focuses primarily on prevention. Her work spans villages in Rajasthan where certain de-notified tribal communities have long been trapped in traditions that push young girls into prostitution as soon as they reach puberty.

Changing that system requires working with entire communities. Her programmes provide scholarships for girls, alternative livelihoods for mothers and support from local police and village councils. Textile waste from companies is turned into bags and other products that create income for women. Kitchen gardens improve household nutrition and local social workers monitor children who are at risk.

The centre of this ecosystem is always the girl herself.

So far, about 950 girls have received scholarships through the programme, staying in school long enough to escape the cycle that once seemed inevitable.

“Some of them now want to become IAS officers,” Rani said. “Others want to become teachers. Ten years ago, they couldn’t imagine a future outside the village.”

Across the room at Winspiration, Shreya Krishnan was speaking about a very different kind of system, but one that also shapes the lives of women every day.

Krishnan, Managing Director, India, of the organisation AnitaB.org, works at the intersection of gender, technology and leadership. Her starting point is blunt: patriarchy is not just a cultural phenomenon but a structural one.

“Women are taught to navigate patriarchy,” she said, “not dismantle it.”

The distinction matters. Much of modern culture celebrates women who succeed within existing systems such as the “girl boss” or the perfectly balanced professional and homemaker. But, Krishnan argues, those archetypes still reinforce the underlying rules.

True change requires challenging the structures themselves.

That challenge has become even more urgent in the digital age. Artificial intelligence systems, trained on biased data, often reproduce the same inequalities present in society. Hiring algorithms may filter out women’s resumes because they are written differently. AI voice assistants are frequently designed with submissive female personas. Even search engines reflect gender stereotypes.

“AI is a mirror of the societies that build it,” Krishnan said. “If the data is biased, the systems will be biased.”

Krishnan’s work focuses on keeping women in the workforce, particularly in technology, where the gender gap widens dramatically over time.

While women make up roughly 38% of entry-level employees, representation drops sharply as careers progress: about 14% at the vice-president level, 8% at CXO roles, and only 2% at the CEO level, Krishnan said.

Part of the challenge lies in structural discrimination, but another part lies in internalised barriers.

“Men will apply for a job when they meet 30 percent of the requirements,” she said. “Women apply only when they meet 90 or 100 percent.”

Her organisation addresses these issues through leadership programmes, mentorship networks, financial literacy training and large-scale convenings such as the Grace Hopper Celebration India, one of the world’s largest gatherings of women in technology.

But Krishnan insists that the transformation must begin within individuals as well.

“You can’t change the world from the outside if you haven’t done the work on the inside,” she said. “A lot of women carry years of self-doubt.”

One of her leadership workshops begins not with strategy or career planning, but with emotional release. Participants often spend the first day confronting internalised expectations and pressures they have carried for years.

“People cry,” she said. “Because they’re finally letting go of things they didn’t realise they were holding.”

Listening to Rani and Krishnan at Winspiration, the contrast between their work could not have been sharper.

One is battling trafficking networks in rural villages, and the other is confronting algorithmic bias and corporate structures in global technology ecosystems. Yet both are engaged in the same broader project: challenging systems that limit women’s agency.

For Rani, the change may be measured in girls who remain in school instead of disappearing into brothels.

For Krishnan, it may be measured in women who reach leadership roles or simply learn to trust their own competence.

Neither expects quick results. As Krishnan noted, global estimates suggest it could take over a century to achieve gender parity at current rates.

But conversations like those at Winspiration, small circles of strangers sharing stories that are difficult to hear but impossible to ignore, are part of how change begins. And in a human library, every story becomes a way of reading the world differently.