GUJARAT: Rakhi Shah’s life is not a tale of sympathy. It is a story of the quiet courage of a woman who, early on, decided that if life had given her pain, she would return it with purpose. What began as a personal struggle slowly transformed into an NGO that today holds countless lives together with compassion, courage, and action.
Born in 1978 in Ahmedabad, Rakhi’s journey was altered before she could even speak. At six months old, after a routine polio vaccination, she developed a severe fever, vomiting, and swelling. When her frightened mother rushed her back to the hospital, the doctor delivered a sentence that would define their lives: “She has polio. There is no medicine. Only lifelong physiotherapy.”
For many, it would have sounded like an ending. For Rakhi’s parents, it became a beginning.
“My mother refused to accept that this was my destiny,” Rakhi recalls. “She believed that if there was effort, there would be hope.”
Physiotherapy became a daily ritual, pain an uninvited companion, and faith their only anchor. Her mother prayed at temples in Bhavnagar, even offering a silver foot, begging only for her daughter to walk. Slowly, step by painful step, Rakhi did. Her right leg remained 1.5 inches shorter, her walk uneven, and her climb up stairs slow. But by the age of five or six, she stood on her own feet.
That strength was tested the moment she entered school.
But her parents built her a customised bicycle so she could travel independently. When a leg surgery at 12 changed her mobility, learning to cycle again meant falls, injuries, and fear. Her family banned her from riding.
But by the 8th standard, she was cycling to school. That stubborn determination carried her through M.Com and LL.B, achievements many had once declared impossible for a “disabled girl.”
Work, however, came with another wall. Jobs felt unsafe. Her father worried. So Rakhi built her own world, starting hobby classes in mehndi, glass painting, wedding accessories, wall painting, and chocolate making. Her mother would come in a rickshaw to pick her up, watching as her daughter stitched confidence into every design. Mehndi became more than art.
“With every design, I wanted to reply to those who doubted us,” Rakhi says. “I wanted to show what people like us can do.” She won first prize in a Gruh Shobha competition, began applying mehndi free of cost to girls from Vikasgruh Orphanage, and formed a team of 10 needy women, turning skill into dignity and work into empowerment. Alongside, she built a successful chocolate and cake business, even training in Mumbai. By 2007, her vision grew larger than herself. She founded Samyak Women Club to break the myth that when women gather, they only gossip.
In 2016, a six-year-old boy named Kushal, suffering from blood cancer, needed chemotherapy costing `1 lakh. His parents were helpless. Rakhi had never asked anyone for money before.
“I thought, if my pride costs a child his life, then my pride means nothing,” she says. She reached out. Friends, family, and club members responded. The money was raised. Kushal lived. That moment gave birth to “Helping Hand” NGO on 12-12-2016, not as an organisation on paper, but as a movement of humanity. What followed was relentless service: emergency blood arrangements, orphanage support, Jivdaya work, Divyang welfare, and life-saving blood donation drives.
Today, Rakhi drives an automatic car. Her limp remains. Her leg remains imperfect. But her life stands tall.