A group of students sat with Shikha Agnihotri late at night, eating ice cream, far from home on a school trip. She asked them how they were doing. What she heard back was not what she expected. Story after story came pouring out, from children across different cities, different states, different schools, all pointing to the same quiet crisis. Were children actually safe at school? The answer, again and again, was no.
Shikha Agnihotri is the founder of the National Council for School Safety (NCSS), an organization that works with schools across India to build standardized, affordable safety compliance systems, currently operating in over 40 cities. She is also the founder of Right Side Story. She has spent years working on child protection and school safety compliance, and building systems that help Indian schools respond to crises.
Her background is not in education in the traditional sense. She studied travel management and holds a master’s degree in German. It was her years working in student travel, starting from 2010, that put her in the middle of conversations that most adults never get to hear. Those conversations led her back to college after her graduation, where she studied law, child protection, and criminal psychology in adolescence.
The Gap Nobody Was Talking About
When Shikha began working with schools, she found that the problem was not a lack of policies. Every school she visited had one. What they did not have was any idea of what to do when something actually happened.
“Everybody has a policy,” she told The Logical Indian. “When we go to schools, I used to ask a lot of tough questions to the school leadership. And they said, yes, we have everything. Then, when an episode actually happened on the campus, they did not know what to do.”
When something went wrong, the confusion was immediate. Should they call the police? Should they tell parents? Should they handle it internally? In that unclear space, children paid the price.
“The biggest gap was understanding the right execution,” she said. “It is about when anything happens on your campus, do you know what to do in the first 10 minutes? Because that if the most critical time, and that is where the biggest gap is.”
Why NCSS Exists
Schools across India were operating without any common standard. Policies were being copied from one school to another, with no regard for the fact that laws change state by state, that an IB school operates differently from a CBSE school, that one size cannot fit all.
The National Council for School Safety was Shikha’s answer to this. NCSS was built to create something standardized, affordable, and made specifically for Indian schools, regardless of where they were located or what board they followed.
In its first year, NCSS worked with over 200 schools across 40-plus cities. The process begins with a detailed checklist sent to the school. The scoring reveals a lot. “Out of 100, they score 20, 30. We have not seen a lot of schools scoring more than 50 right now,” she said, in conversation with The Logical Indian. The second step is a physical audit of the campus across 15 safety parameters. The third step involves training, policy-making, and workshops with students on topics ranging from bullying and mental well-being to puberty and substance use.
What Safety Actually Looks Like
When most people think about school safety, they think about CCTV cameras and boundary walls. Shikha thinks about the exhaust fan in the chemistry lab.
“Whenever we talk about the lab, we cannot put the exhaust fan on the top. It has to be in the bottom, because the fumes are heavy. So if you put it on top, it is actually a fire hazard.”
CCTV is, in NCSS’s framework, just one sub-parameter under 15 broader parameters. The rest goes much deeper, into transport, lab safety, mental well-being, staff training, and whether anyone in the school’s leadership has actual accountability for each of these areas.
She checks whether chemicals are stored in plastic or glass bottles, whether they sit in metal cupboards, and whether the transport vendors hired by the school have been properly vetted. During audits, her team also speaks casually with students and staff, just to understand how people are actually feeling on campus. In one school, she found that a third-party vendor had hired people who were not even Indian nationals, and that same vendor attempted to bribe her team when the issue was flagged.
Her core argument is simple: “Safety is about people. It’s about practice.”
She uses the example of the Indian Army. Soldiers train every single day, not because a war is happening every day, but because when it does, they know exactly what to do. That is the standard NCSS is trying to build in schools.
The Mindset Problem
The biggest resistance NCSS faces is not financial. It is the belief that nothing bad can happen here.
“The biggest and the most dangerous misconception is that this has never happened in our school,” she said. School leadership sits across from her with no dedicated budget for safety compliance, no accountability structures, no clear processes, and insist that everything is under control.
She is also clear that the law in India is not the problem. “We are very fortunate that in our country we have amazing laws in terms of child protection. JJ Act is there, POCSO is there. They’re very solid, very powerful acts.” The problem is that implementation has not caught up. There are not enough trained people. There are no clear goals. Accountability is scattered.
Another issue she points to is the copy-paste culture around policy writing. Schools borrow policies from each other without understanding whether those policies apply to their board, their state, or their specific circumstances.
“A policy by itself can never protect a child in any way; it is its implementation that makes it a success or a failure. In effect, it’s the people and processes that can only protect the children.”
Measuring Change
NCSS returns to schools six months after the first audit to measure what has actually changed. These are not casual visits. Schools, she notes with some lightness, are “scared” of them because they know her team will look hard.
Beyond audits, NCSS has built AI-powered dashboards that let school management track safety compliance in real time. A swimming pool cleaning schedule, a fire safety certificate about to expire, a blind spot on campus that needs fixing: all of it is visible on the system, with alerts sent 15 days before any deadline. The goal was to make these tools user-friendly and affordable enough that no school would have reason to skip them.
NCSS also runs India’s first school safety compliance helpline, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Shikha’s phone, she says, is never off.
One of the shifts she points to as a sign of real progress is that schools that once would never have considered calling the police are now doing exactly that. “So many schools have actually called the cops. Schools that probably would not even think of going to the cops now are actually calling. They’re not afraid.”
What Comes Next
The larger goal Shikha is working toward is an Indian accreditation system for school safety, one that schools can be formally certified under. Many schools she visits show her their ISO certification as proof of credibility. Her point is that ISO is an international body, not designed for safety, and not built for Indian ground realities.
“That’s my larger goal,” she said. “I want to just leave behind creating those solid systems and accreditation modules for schools to become safe.”
It would also serve her original aim with NCSS: giving every school in the country, from a low-income government school to a high-end private one, a clear, common, Indian standard to work toward.
The One Thing She Wants Everyone to Hear
When asked if the scale of the problem ever drains her, Shikha says no. Her team is equally committed. The helpline runs round the clock. The work continues.
But there is one thing she keeps coming back to, because she feels it is not being said loudly enough. Every time a child dies by suicide at school, a pattern emerges in what parents say afterwards. They realise that the child had been vocalising their concern; sometimes the parents failed to heed it, and sometimes the schools, when raised with them. This is not one incident. It is true for nearly every incident.
“I really want to scream, shout and tell everybody that, guys, open your eyes. This is the gap. We just have to listen.”
The children are already speaking. The question is whether the adults responsible for their safety are paying attention.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Children spend a significant part of their lives within school walls, and parents send them there trusting they are in safe hands. But as Shikha Agnihotri’s work reveals, that trust is often built on assumption rather than evidence.
The gap between a policy on paper and a person who knows what to do in a crisis is wide, and children are falling through it every day. Child safety cannot be an afterthought. It has to be built into the foundation of every school, for every child.
Do you think your child’s school is truly prepared for a safety crisis, or is it just ticking boxes on paper?
If you’d like us to feature your story, please write to us at csr@5w1h.media
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