Background

India educates a large number of women in science. Comparatively few of them end up in engineering. The All India Survey on Higher Education 2023-24 puts women at 44% of all STEM enrolment, an increase of 38.4% compared to ten years. However, undergraduate engineering and technology tells a different story. Women make up roughly 31% of students in STEM education, and in branches such as mechanical engineering the figure falls below 10%. The pattern carries into working life: women hold about 27% of jobs in India's STEM sector and under 19% of its research positions. UNESCO has noted the same contradiction on a wider scale. India produces one of the world's highest shares of women STEM graduates, around 45%, yet across G20 countries women hold only 22% of STEM jobs.

The gap opens long before university. ASER 2024 found that 26.9% of girls own a smartphone, against 36.2% of boys, a difference that shows up in every state. Schools rarely make up the shortfall. UDISE report recorded that in schools in India, available functional computers are only at  57.2%. What follows from that scarcity has been well documented. The ASPIRES research at King's College London and University College London, which surveyed more than 40,000 students, found that a young person's STEM ambitions depend heavily on what it calls ‘science capital’. The science-related knowledge, contacts and everyday exposure a family happens to have. Some households have a great deal of it. Most have very little, and the difference tracks closely with class and gender.

Hands-on competitions are one of the few things that reliably shift this. Girls who take part in them are more likely to go on to engineering than girls who never get the chance. The difficulty is who gets into the room in the first place. In programmes such as VEX Robotics, girls account for roughly 23% of participants.

How a programme is designed makes more difference than it might appear. STEM Racing, the school engineering competition backed by Formula 1, has reached over 1.83 million students in more than 60 countries, and at its 2024 national finals in Saudi Arabia, 68% of participants were girls. India has been building capacity as well, through the Department of Science and Technology's Vigyan Jyoti programme, now running across 100 districts, and a commitment to open 50,000 more Atal Tinkering Labs. None of this removes the final obstacle. Entering a competition still requires a team, a kit, an entry fee, somewhere to build, and someone who has done it before. For most girls in low-resource schools, that list remains out of reach.

FastTrack Delhi was founded in July 2026 to close that particular gap. Working through partner NGOs, it provides competition kits, mentorship, sponsorship networks and public showcases so that girls from economically disadvantaged backgrounds can enter STEM competitions, STEM Racing in particular, and come away with both the skills and the confidence to carry on.