17th Oct 2025
Dainik Bhaskar, Indore
Black Belt Karate expert Anya is teaching karate free of cost to girl students.
Seeing an incident of harassment, she decided on her goal.
Gave the power of self-defense to 6,000 girl students.
By Ganesh Vishwakarma | Indore
Sometimes, certain events have such a profound impact on a person that they completely alter their life’s direction.
A similar incident occurred with this city’s student, Anya Sanghvi.
After witnessing an incident of eve-teasing near her home, she felt scared and helpless. That incident became the turning point of her life. She decided to learn self-defense and teach other girls as well.
Today, Anya, a black belt, is training girls free of charge and has already empowered more than 6,000 schoolgirls through her initiative.
She began by teaching small groups and gradually expanded the sessions to government schools across Indore. Now, girls are not only learning physical techniques of defence but also gaining confidence and self-belief through her guidance.
The girls whom she once trained have also joined her in this mission of training students.
She has now got requests from other cities to start her initiative there.
“I can never forget that incident of harassment.”
Anya says she was deeply shaken after witnessing the harassment near her home. Even after reaching home, the scene replayed in her mind again and again. And that day her real journey began. For the last seven years, she has been training in karate and self-defense.
Her father, Abhishek Sanghvi, shared that Anya said she could protect herself after becoming a black belt, but then she also wanted to teach this skill to others. That is when he realised that she wanted to do something bigger.
The girls now say that they are no longer scared.
Anya says that, along with her studies, whenever she gets time, she spends taking workshops in nearby government schools.
Many workshops are conducted between 7:00am and 8:00am so that her studies, along with those of other girls, are not disturbed.
She also goes to some schools in the evening.
Her team is now conducting 6-day training sessions across schools. Her initiative, DFEND, focuses not just on teaching defence techniques but also on building mental resilience and awareness.
Most of the students she trains come from underpriveleged backgrounds where the fathers are poor laborers and the mothers are maids. Earlier, these girls were scared, but now they are fearless.
There are requests from Mumbai, Delhi, and Bhubaneshwar to conduct the DFEND sessions there.