Nidhi Ashok Goyal
Founder and Executive Director
Nidhi Ashok Goyal is the Founder and Executive Director of Rising Flame, working for leadership and rights of women, youth, and persons with disabilities in India. She has been working on disability rights and gender justice for the past 12 years at the national, regional, and global levels-through research, writing, policy influence, and art.
She was appointed on the steering committee of the C20 process in India’s G20 presidency in 2023. She was instrumental in the creation of the Disability, Equity, Justice Working Group in C20 India and led the group as the Coordinator. In 2023, she was appointed by the state government of Goa as an ambassador to the Purple Fest, India’s largest and the first festival on disability and diversity.
She has been invited on the core group of persons with disabilities by the National Human Rights Commission, India, is on the diversity and inclusion task force of FICCI, and sits on the advisory board of Voice, a grant making project by the Dutch ministry. She has just completed her term as President of Association for Women’s Rights in Development and as a global advisor to UN Women’s Executive Director. She works to raise the profile of issues at the intersection of disability and gender through op-eds, journal articles, and lectures in national and international forums. She influences organisations, systems and structures, policies and human rights discourses to be more inclusive in national and global spaces.
Nidhi has been committed to changing lives of persons with disabilities and has worked with a range of National and global women’s rights, disability rights, and human rights organizations, including Point of View, Human Rights Watch, Sight Savers, and CREA. Her work on disability, gender, diversity and inclusion have made way into many corporate offices and policy spaces.
Nidhi is also India’s first female disabled stand-up comedian and uses humor to challenge prevailing notions about disability and gender.
At 15, when Nidhi started losing sight and learning to live a full life with her disability, she promised herself that she would work to extend opportunities for growth to other people with disabilities who did not have access to the family support, resources, and privileges she drew upon for support. Rising Flame takes this commitment forward.
You can follow Nidhi’s work on Twitter @saysnidhigoyal.
Srinidhi Raghavan
Programmes Lead
Srinidhi (she/her) is a disabled feminist, educator, writer and researcher. She works at the intersections of sexuality, gender, disability and technology. She is Programmes Lead, Rising Flame. Her work for the past 14 years has focused on deepening conversations around sexuality, on understanding how technology and disability intersect, on building social, emotional and disability support, on imagining a feminist internet, on rights of persons with disabilities, on expanding our vocabulary around mental health, chronic illness and disability, and building more spaces where disabled people can thrive.
She also works with adolescents, facilitators and parents at The Learning Centre, Moira on building more robust, resilient relationships with ourselves and the world around us. She provides social, emotional and disability support for the learners at the Centre.
She has written for national and international news platforms and organisations on gender, sexuality, disability and technology. She wrote a column in India for FirstPost called Bodies and Minds that looked at the often ignored intersection of gender and disability. You can find a longer list of her writing here. She is interested in learning and practising community care, disability justice, and intersectional feminism. She lives with chronic illnesses and invisible disabilities that impact how she engages with the world. This personal experience informs her commitment to the Rising Flame vision and mission, and her work towards making this vision a reality.
Prathama Raghavan
Lead Mental Health Programme Consultant
Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee
Lead Policy and Research Consultant
Shikha is a lawyer and researcher. Her work focuses on advancing decent work and social justice, and gender, caste and race in the global economy. She addresses systemic violence, with a focus on women, labor migrants, and persons with disabilities.
Shikha’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion infuses her practice, scholarly work, and approach to teaching and collaboration. Her portfolio encompasses research and advocacy in collaboration with large global institutions like Human Rights Watch, the International Labour Organization, Global Labor Justice – International Labor Rights Forum, and the Freedom Fund. It also includes collaborations with more than 30 grassroots partner organizations and coalitions concentrated in Asia and Africa.
Shikha holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a BA in English and Ethnicity, Race and Migration from Yale University.
She has published papers in peer reviewed journals and law reviews, a litigation guide on India’s Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, more than a twenty policy reports, and program and process documentation on good practices among social movement actors in challenging structural discrimination. My research has been well covered in the media, including by Al Jazeera, BBC News, CNN, Devex, The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Nation, The New York Times, Reuters, TIME, VICE, and Vogue Business.
Fizza Juddy
Coordinator - Social Media & Communications
Fizza Juddy is an intersectional feminist writer and communications professional, currently the Coordinator - Social Media and Communications at Rising Flame. With a BA in Media and Journalism from Middlesex University, Dubai, Fizza brings together storytelling, strategy, and advocacy for marginalised communities, especially women, the youth, and persons with disabilities.
Raised in the Gulf and deeply shaped by growing up online, Fizza’s worldview is informed by a cross-cultural lens and digital fluency. Her journey with Rising Flame began during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when she joined as an intern and later contributed as a freelance transcriber. These experiences proved transformative, grounding her commitment to disability rights and inclusive communication.
Fizza lives with invisible disabilities, and as such explores themes of gender, mental health, and access from that lens in her work. Her personal experiences drive her compassion and push her to create work that affirms dignity, challenges stigma, and builds understanding.
Bharti Arya
Programmes Coordinator
Bharti Arya is a gender specialist with over seven years of experience in designing and implementing feminist policies for the Ministry of Education under World Bank-funded projects. Her work has focused on transforming higher education institutions across India by centering the voices and lived realities of marginalized students, particularly SC/ST students, women, and students with disabilities.
As a consultant on national-level government projects, Bharti mentored 174 engineering institutions on building inclusive, gender-equitable policies. Her efforts directly impacted over 10,000 students, contributing to a 10% improvement in the enrolment rate of students with disabilities by ensuring that accessibility infrastructure was prioritized, not as an add-on, but as a core component of institutional reform.
Bharti holds a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Jodhpur and is currently completing her Master’s in Women and Gender Studies. She combines her technical background, on-ground experience, and policy knowledge to bring a feminist and inclusive approach to creating change in systems. She is currently based in Noida and continues to advocate for inclusive, rights-based development in education and beyond.
