On Thursday, April 11, NYU Stern’s Business and Society Program (BSP) proudly hosted the 2024 Ashok C. Sani Distinguished Scholar-In-Residence Lecture. The event was moderated by Batia Wiesenfeld, Director of the Business and Society Program, and featured esteemed guest Ruchira Gupta, an Emmy Award-winning activist, author, journalist, and founder of Apne Aap. Gupta shared insights on "How Business Can Help to Stop Human Trafficking," shedding a light on the critical role business can play in combating human trafficking around the world. 

Gupta’s story began while on assignment in Nepal as a young journalist stumbling upon rows of villages with missing girls. She learned many of them, as young as 12 years old, were smuggled across the border to be sold in Indian brothels. This experience compelled her to record the stories of the survivors by creating a documentary called, The Selling of Innocents, where she won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism. 

For Gupta, highlighting the issue was not enough, she sought to do more for afflicted women and decided to start a non-profit organization (NGO) called Apne Aap. Apne Aap is built on the mission to empower women and girls to exit systems of prostitution, and to create a world in which no human being is bought or sold. Her more recent works include conversations with the United Nations, and the debut of her latest novel, I Kick and I Fly, narrating a story of a young girl finding the courage to create her own destiny despite her tribe’s system of intergenerational prostitution.