In a village in north Karnataka, the nearest pharmacy is 20 kilometres away. For most people, this is simply an inconvenience to plan around. For a young woman named Pallavi, it became a question worth solving. 

What if medicines could be dispensed the way cash is, through a machine as common as an ATM?

That idea found its way onto a national stage this June. Pallavi was one of 6,151 young women from 23 states who took part in WitchHunt 2026, India's first AI-powered hackathon designed for girls and young women. 

Organised by HopeWorks Foundation along with AI4India and the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission, the initiative set out to do something hackathons rarely attempt: bring women from the country’s smaller towns and overlooked villages into India’s AI conversation, rather than asking them to catch up with it later. 

WitchHunt did not appear out of nowhere. For six years, HopeWorks Foundation has worked towards a singular, ambitious goal: getting a million girls from underserved communities into college and, eventually, into meaningful employment. 

Jacintha Jayachandran, the foundation's Founder Trustee, has spent that time identifying the barriers that often hold girls back, from access to education and mentorship to gaps in basic health awareness.

Then AI arrived, and with it, a new and unexpected worry. As Jayachandran puts it, the girls the foundation worked with began to wonder whether artificial........

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