Seventeen-year-old Naavya Shah's idea was simple -- source fresh flour from a women-run mill, sell it directly to customers and, wherever possible, put women in charge of the parts of the business they had traditionally been excluded from.
At 13, Naavya Shah wanted to help people.
She and a classmate had started Dressing Hearts, a school initiative through which they collected, refurbished and donated clothes to people from underserved communities. They also organised bake sales to raise money for essentials.
Then came a visit to Shantighar, a women's shelter in Mumbai.
Naavya arrived with the things she thought the women might need-- clothes, grains and other basic supplies. Then, she spoke to the women.
They told her about their lives and the everyday things they struggled to access. Among them was something so ordinary to Naavya that she had never considered it a privilege -- flour or aata.
"Aata is something we use every day. I was still a child and it was a big shock to me that there are people who don't even have access to such basic needs," Naavya tells Rishika Shah/Rediff.
She began using money from her bake sales to donate around 50 kg of flour to the shelter every month.
Soon, another question began bothering her.
If she could buy good quality flour for roughly Rs 4,500 to Rs 5,000 and donate 50 kg, where was the rest of the money in the supply chain going?
More importantly, how much were the people who actually produced the flour earning?
"I remember thinking, if the aata itself is this cheap and we're paying so little for it, what are the people behind this even getting?" she says.
That question took Naavya, then 13, down a rabbit hole she hadn't expected to enter.
She began looking at the flour supply chain, speaking to women farmers and women working at mills and trying to understand who controlled the pricing.
What she found changed her thinking.
The women doing the physical work often had little say in what they were paid. There was no direct relationship between them and the customers buying their products. Middlemen stood between the producer and the person ultimately purchasing the flour.
For Naavya, the problem was no longer simply that women needed donations. They needed ownership.
That realisation eventually became Aata Girl, a social enterprise Naavya started while still in school. The idea was simple: Source fresh flour from a women-run mill, sell it directly to customers and, wherever possible, put women in charge of the parts of the business they had traditionally been excluded from.
It was no longer just about giving women something. It was about giving them a stake in what they were producing.
How Aata Girl Grew From 1 Kg Orders To A Business
Aata Girl began on a decidedly unglamorous scale. Naavya put advertisements and flyers in the lifts of her 23-building housing society.
Initially, people ordered a kilo or two. Some called to ask what the venture was about. Then the orders increased -- people who had ordered earlier were ordering again.
"People started re-ordering; the size of the orders increased as well, from one kilo to three or four kilos," she says.
Soon, Naavya was personally making packets, putting stickers on them and coordinating deliveries. Within a month, she was sending out 50 kg to 60 kg of flour a week just within her own society.
That was when she realised people weren't buying merely because they wanted to support a teenage girl with a social cause. They were coming back because they wanted the product.
"It had become a proper business," she smiles.
Today, she says, Aata Girl has sold more than 3,000 kg of flour, supported 31 women and served more than 350 families.
But Naavya's definition of success goes beyond those numbers.
From Quiet Worker To Head Of Operations
When Naavya first met Kaanchi, who had moved to Mumbai from Darjeeling, she saw someone who was educated, articulate and understood business concepts.
But Kaanchi was also shy. She knew what she was doing, Naavya says, but wasn't always confident about expressing it.
At the beginning, when customers called with questions about the flour or the business, Naavya would give Kaanchi a written message telling her what to say.
Then something shifted. Kaanchi began negotiating prices herself. She started offering customers deals based on the quantity they ordered. She began speaking to suppliers. She started making decisions rather than simply carrying them out.
Today, she is the head of operations at Aata Girl.
For Naavya, that progression became more important than the flour itself. "It made me realise what happens when you give someone the space to grow into a role instead of boxing them into one kind of work."
That is also why Naavya doesn't describe Aata Girl as a project in which she is "empowering" women who cannot help themselves. She is uncomfortable with that framing. "I don't think I'm impacting them because they can't help themselves," she says.
"Everyone has the same capability. They just need to be given a better way to articulate that or showcase that."
It is an important distinction. For Naavya, empowerment isn't about being someone's saviour. It is about access to the room, the information and the opportunity to negotiate for yourself.
Building A Business While In School
There is another unusual element to Aata Girl -- its founder is 17.
Naavya is currently in the final year of her IB diploma at Mumbai's Oberoi International School, studying higher-level mathematics, business and economics.
When she started Aata Girl, she was 16; she discovered that being young was not always an advantage. Customers were initially sceptical. Would their order actually arrive? Was the flour really organic? Was this a legitimate business or simply a school project?
Naavya found herself having to prove her credibility before people would even trust her with a one kilo order. "I feel like I had to explain myself a lot and prove that it was actually a real functioning initiative and not some school side project."
The scepticism pushed her to make the venture look and operate more like a business. She built a Web site, formalised the communication around the brand and began thinking about customer service and operations.
But building the business while completing school has meant stretching her days far beyond the timetable of an ordinary student.
When school began, she realised Aata Girl couldn't be treated like a weekend project. There were actual orders but, more importantly, there were people whose incomes depended on the work.
Since Class 11, Naavya says she has often woken up at 4 am to finish schoolwork before heading to school at 8.
School ends at 3 pm. Then come the Aata Girl orders. Her day can stretch until around 10.30 pm.
Eventually, she had to build a team around herself, including women handling operations, customer service and deliveries.
The irony isn't lost on her -- a business designed to create opportunities for women also forced its teenage founder to learn that she couldn't be the only person holding every part of it together.
Can The Business Scale?
Naavya now has ambitions considerably larger than a housing society in Mumbai.
She wants Aata Girl to become a network of women-run flour mills, supported by women delivery partners, supplying fresh organic flour across Mumbai and eventually beyond. She is also exploring quick-commerce platforms.
But scaling presents a problem. Freshness is central to Aata Girl's proposition. Flour is sourced and shipped quickly rather than sitting in packaging for long periods.
That becomes harder to guarantee when the business grows and distribution distances increase.
"That principle would be threatened by scaling," Naavya admits.
There is also the more fundamental question of money.
Aata Girl is now sustainable through growing orders, but Naavya admits that in its early stages, the business relied on donations to bridge the gap between what customers were willing to pay and what it cost to operate.
She doesn't want that to remain the model. The ultimate goal is a business that can sustain itself through sales while continuing to pay women fairly.
That may be the hardest part of Naavya's ambition -- proving that social impact doesn't have to exist separately from commercial viability.
Why Aata Girl Is About More Than Flour
Ask Naavya what she wants Aata Girl to ultimately change and she doesn't talk about kilos of flour. She talks about a woman's relationship with her own worth. She wants women to stop accepting whatever they are told their labour is worth.
"I want the women to want to fight for it," she says. Not because they are helpless. Not because someone has decided to "empower" them. But because they understand that their work has value and they have the confidence to demand it.
That idea goes back to the question Naavya asked herself at 13: If the person buying the flour pays so little, what does the person doing the work actually get?
Years later, she is still chasing the answer. Only now, she isn't simply donating the flour. She is trying to change who gets to decide its price.
And perhaps that is the bigger thing Aata Girl is selling -- not a packet of flour, but the possibility that the woman who produces it gets to have a say in what her work is worth.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
