Our Journey
Why I started Rahat.
My mother’s school day ended in the afternoon. Her work often continued until midnight. I grew up beside that work.
The work followed her home.
My mother has taught at a private school in Delhi for twenty years. For fifteen of those years, I sat beside her in the evenings, helping with the computer side of her work.
She would leave for school at 7:30 a.m. and return around 3:30 p.m. At 5 p.m., she would sit down to work again, sometimes until midnight.
Result analysis. Portal data entry. Messages from parents at night. I wanted to take that second shift off her shoulders so she could spend more time doing what she loves: teaching.
I asked other teachers.
I started a survey to understand what other teachers were experiencing. The first 26 responses came mostly from teachers at private CBSE schools.
Named portal data entry among their biggest time sinks.
Said a phone tool that automated even one administrative task would help.
Said the Holistic Progress Card had increased their workload.
Those responses helped me understand what to build.
Source: my teacher survey, first 26 responses. These findings describe this small group of respondents.
One question changed the plan.
“What about the final data entry we'd still have to do in the school portal?”
A teacher asked me this when I had narrowed Rahat to a tool that would take some administrative work off teachers.
She was right. If the teacher still had to repeat the work in another system, I had left part of the problem unsolved.
That question brought me back to the original idea: an operating system for the whole school.
Rahat grew to include the whole school.
I’m now building Rahat as an AI-native operating system for Indian schools: one system designed to support teachers, school leaders, office staff and parents.
It is still in development. The aim is to reduce the work that falls between people and disconnected systems, while keeping people involved where their judgement is needed.
Rahat started with my mother’s evenings. Listening to other teachers helped me see how much of the school needed to work together to change them.