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In 2008, when I was 17,
I felt invisible.
And not like Harry Potter
with an invisibility cloak.
I actually felt really powerless.
I remember watching the news
every single day with my parents.
It was like a ritual in our house.
And the more I saw it,
the more I realized that I just
couldn't relate with it.
The people didn't look like me,
the issues didn't feel like mine.
And more than anything,
young people's voices
were nowhere to be found.
Now I have grown up in a family
where everybody cared deeply
about what was happening in the world.
So naturally we had a lot
of conversation at home.
I had many opinions, many perspectives
and experiences that I wanted
to share with the world,
but there was absolutely nowhere to go.
My friends who I spoke with,
my teachers who I spoke with,
they all reminded me
of the only thing that mattered,
and that was how
I performed in my exams.
And that's it.
(Laughter)
So I was extremely disappointed,
very frustrated.
And the only thing that I knew
and I loved was writing.
So I started a blog.
I had absolutely
no idea what I was doing.
I just went online and I started writing,
and I forced my friends
to read what I was saying.
My first story was actually
about climate change,
and I remember asking a friend to read it,
and she went ahead
and she commented on it.
And the comment was a smiling emoji.
So I was disappointed
because I wanted more.
I realized that, you know,
a lot of us young people,
we grew up in this culture of silence.
We are told, don't question,
don't think critically,
don't ask too much.
And that was something
that really frustrated me.
I loved writing, like I said,
so I thought that I'll do
something interesting.
I launched a writer's training program.
Young people, they want better jobs,
they want to be skilled,
so I thought I'll skill them in writing.
And by that time, by the way,
I had about a thousand
readers on the blog.
So I thought about 30 people will apply.
At least 30 people
will apply for this program.
And to my surprise,
only two did.
(Laughter)
So I took those two
and gave them the best that I had.
Every single day, I would train them
on how to write better.
But what they were writing about
was actually tough issues.
Gender, discrimination, climate change,
issues that we are not
taught to talk about.
And something slowly began
to shift in them.
The more they wrote,
the more they began to question.
They started acting.
They started wondering
why things were the way they were.
And that motivated me to go
school to school, college to college,
sticking up posters, asking more
and more young people to join me.
Slowly and steadily,
a community began to form.
And that blog became Youth Ki Awaaz,
or Voice of the Youth,
India's largest citizen media platform,
where today more than 200,000
young people are writing
on issues that are deeply
underrepresented every single month.
(Applause)
And this was not just young
people coming together and ranting.
This was young people coming
together and telling stories
that were not being told anywhere.
So let me tell you about Ashwini.
Ashwini was a medical student
studying in the state of Rajasthan.
And he had this phenomenal habit.
Every single summer break,
he would go to the closest village
and provide free medical services.
So he went to this village called Rajghat,
a couple of kilometers away
from the city of Jaipur in India.
And when he went there,
what he found was far more
than a medical crisis.
There was absolutely
no clean drinking water.
There were no proper roads.
There was no electricity.
And he realized that there
were no schools at all.
And no weddings had taken
place in the last 22 years
because nobody wanted to send
their daughters to a village
which was so impoverished.
Imagine a village of single men.
(Laughter)
But like I said, Ashwini saw this
as more than just a medical crisis.
He wanted to do so much more for Rajghat.
So he collaborated with us,
and he told the story of Rajghat
on Youth Ki Awaaz.
It slowly and steadily
began picking attention.
Thousands of people
found out about Rajghat,
NGOs came there,
the first time in many years
decision makers came to Rajghat
and support began to rally.
The courts took suo motu cognizance
and asked the government to act.
Slowly, electricity came to Rajghat.
The first-ever school was built
in Rajghat as well.
And --
(Applause)
And guess what?
The first wedding in 22 years.
(Applause)
And Ashwini was not alone.
After Ashwini, we saw Jolly's story.
Jolly was a wheelchair user.
Struggled her entire life
to find accessible toilets.
Her story went so viral,
was read by more than a million people
in less than a week,
including the HR of her organization,
that all the toilets at her workplace
were reconstructed for her.
After Jolly came Rayees.
Rayees talked about how
there was a complete lack
of menstrual hygiene awareness
in the state of Kashmir in India.
And his story sparked one of the largest
menstrual hygiene awareness
campaigns in Kashmir.
And for Pranay,
his story led to the rescue of his father,
who was stranded
in Libya during the Arab Spring.
And not just that.
Eighteen thousand Indians
were brought back to the country
because his story made an impact.
(Applause)
Now, these are not anomalies.
We saw hundreds of them over the years,
and what we realized was that we were
really building individual agency.
We were enabling a muscle,
the muscle of change making.
But as the platform grew,
the world became a lot more complex,
we realized that the issues
are also becoming very complex.
It's difficult to get heard more and more,
the louder the world gets.
And climate change seemed
like this faceless, shapeless,
this mammoth of a beast that we just
did not know what to do about.
Thousands of young people
had written about climate change
on Youth Ki Awaaz,
but it was almost
like we were talking at it.
We didn't know what to do about it.
So in 2023, we decided
to do something different.
We decided that we are going
to collectivize these voices.
So we launched a campaign
called ZeroSeHero.
The idea was very simple.
We'll bring together young people,
we'll get thousands of their stories,
and we'll build a common platform
where young people, decision makers,
businesses, nonprofits,
they can all come together
to talk about something
that climate experts love
to talk about: net zero.
Nobody understands it.
We wanted people to understand it.
This is the reality.
So ZeroSeHero started.
We ran thousands of polls,
we ran many surveys,
we trained thousands of citizens
to tell their climate stories
in their own way.
And slowly the campaign
became a national campaign.
People started talking about it
in closed circles,
it became a public conversation.
We started organizing
dialogues with policymakers
and young people on the same dais,
and things began to move forward.
We noticed a larger net-zero
conversation happening in India.
So in 2023, we did something else as well.
We partnered with India's National
Institute of Urban Affairs
to co-create the country's
first youth engagement frameworks
that puts young people at the center
of climate decision making in cities.
And this year we are beginning
to roll it out across the country
in multiple cities,
along with city governments.
And this --
(Applause)
And this really changes the perspective.
We were building individual agency.
And we realized that at some point
we're actually building
collective agency as well.
We're trying to move
things forward a lot faster.
But this generation, Gen Z,
Gen Alpha, gets criticized a lot
and I'm here for them.
It's very important to stand for them.
What we realized was
that for the younger generation,
it's very important to build
the reflex of change-making
as something that is
as simple as texting a friend,
something that really makes them feel
like they're beginning to participate.
They're beginning to change
the conversation somewhere.
So this year, we're beginning
to use AI to do that.
We are building the country's
first WhatsApp bot
that uses AI to send thousands
of young people in our community
one single question
on a critical issue a day.
Answering this makes them realize
that critical thinking
is deeply important,
but in return, we get access
to critical data
about what young people are thinking,
the future that they're imagining,
so we can make better use of it,
and talk to policy makers
about things that truly matter.
And let me also tell you
one very important thing,
which is that this kind of work cannot
happen on your regular social media.
Social media is not built
for social change.
It's built for vanity.
It's not built for equity.
Right?
(Applause)
It's unfortunately built
to enhance the loudest voice,
not necessarily the most authentic.
So what does this mean?
This means that we need
to invest in storytelling.
We need to invest
in collectivizing voices.
And that means we need
to invest in community.
We've built a blueprint
for how we can do it in India,
and we cannot wait
to take it across the world
to every single young person.
Thank you.
(Cheers and applause)
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