The Scientist Who Stays.

If you ask me why I do this work, I can answer in a single breath: because I was never interested in anything else.

I grew up in Agra, in a family entirely in government service my parents, my grandparents. There were no entrepreneurs in my household, no one building empires. What was built, instead, was character. The lesson I absorbed before I could articulate it was this: take up a responsibility and play your part, fully and honestly. Money and recognition are consequences, not goals. My family had a saying I’ve carried my whole life “If you are a pujari of Saraswati, success and everything else will follow.”

That idea that devotion to knowledge is its own reward became the foundation of everything I would do.

By the time I was in Class 10, I knew where I belonged. The biology practicals weren’t something I endured; they were the part of school I looked forward to. In Class 12, it was clearer still. I wasn’t pursuing marks. I was pursuing understanding. Around fifteen or sixteen, the direction began to sharpen on its own. Embryology wasn’t a deliberate choice so much as a natural filtration. The more I learned, the more it called to me.

I was always a fast learner. Across every training batch I was part of, I was the one who grasped things quickly not to show off, but because I simply couldn’t help being fascinated. That fascination has never left.

My Aha moment wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a single day or a single patient. It was the accumulation of years spent in a lab realising: this is exactly where I am supposed to be.

My early career was spent at a national research institute, surrounded by the country’s finest scientists. For six to seven years, twelve-hour days were standard. I wouldn’t do that now responsibilities have grown, and I wouldn’t be able to but I loved every hour of it. I was not just doing science; I was becoming a scientist.

My most important mentor during this period was Dr. Sachidanand Day. He changed something essential in me. I was, by nature, deeply introverted content to stay inside my own mind, inside the lab. After eight or nine months working alongside him, I realised that staying quiet was holding my research back. Ideas need collision. Feedback needs exchange. He didn’t tell me to change; he showed me, by example, what was possible when you stepped out.

I began to communicate. To engage. To share. That shift from solitary absorption to collaborative openness prepared me for everything that came next.

In 2011, I had recently moved to Ambad. I was searching for opportunities applying to smaller institutes, looking for the right fit. Dr. Harshalata and Dr. Atish came to meet my husband; they were batchmates. They mentioned they were starting an IVF centre. I asked who was handling the embryology. There was a pause. Things fell into place.

What convinced me wasn’t a promise of salary or title. It was watching Dr. Harshalata’s mind at work. She was open genuinely, constitutionally open to new ideas. For an embryologist, that is everything. A doctor who resists innovation is a locked door. Harsha was a wide-open window. I knew: this was where I could grow with the organisation, introduce new methods, and do the work I was trained to do on my own terms, with full integrity.

Every founder fights something. My battle is against a very specific kind of lie: the fiction of certain outcomes.

The IVF industry gets one thing dangerously wrong and that thing is the promise of certain success.

Here is the truth that too few clinics will say plainly: a Grade 1 embryo improves your chances. It does not guarantee your pregnancy. There are too many variables. The chance factor is real. When clinics present embryo grading as a verdict as a promise they are setting couples up for a devastating crash when biology takes its natural, unpredictable course.

There are other myths just as harmful. The belief that in IVF, the baby will somehow be someone else’s a fear rooted in misunderstanding, not medicine. The belief that a woman with PCOS must first “fix” her cycle before pursuing IVF, when in fact, if there is an infertility issue, that is precisely what must be addressed first.

These myths delay treatment. They drive couples toward wrong decisions. They create shame where there should be clarity.

My response to all of them is the same. Educate. Make aware. Be transparent. I will never tell a patient what they want to hear in order to win their business. I will tell them what they need to know in order to make an informed decision about their own bodies and their own lives.

Ethical marketing, to me, means one thing: you cannot manipulate people through hope. Hope must be honest, or it is not hope it is cruelty in disguise.

The hardest moments in building anything at Samarth have never been personal crises of confidence. They have been scientific challenges: the gap between knowing a technique exists and knowing how to make it yours.

When vitrification arrived—the flash-freezing technique that transformed how we preserve embryos—we did not rush it into patient care. We began experimenting. Not on patients—on the technique itself. We wanted to understand it from the inside before we trusted it with someone’s future.

There were setbacks. The newness of the method created errors we hadn’t anticipated. There were moments where results didn’t match expectations. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But here is what I believe, borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita and carried since I was eleven: “Give me courage to change what I can.” Not a prayer for things to be easier. A commitment to keep working until they are.

We standardised the technique. It took time. It required the patience to sit with uncertainty without abandoning the process. And today, vitrification is a cornerstone of what we offer—not because we adopted it early, but because we did the hard work of making it reliable.

I have never experienced stress in the way most people describe it. I operate on a simple belief: play your part, and things will happen. You don’t need to carry the weight of outcomes you cannot fully control. What you can control is the quality of your effort, the honesty of your process, and the care you bring to every decision.

My leadership rule for my team reflects this: make your own mistakes and learn from them. Growth doesn’t come from watching someone else fail. It comes from doing the work yourself, with full accountability.

Who are we doing this for? We are doing this for the people who are tired of being misled. For the couple who has been promised the moon by three different clinics and come to us hollowed out by false hope. For the woman who has been told her PCOS disqualifies her from IVF, when the real issue is her fertility is the thing we should have been treating all along. For the patient who doesn’t understand why the Grade 1 embryo didn’t result in a pregnancy, and needs an honest answer more than a comforting one.

What I want patients to feel when they walk through our doors or when they encounter Samarth online is this: we know what you are carrying, and you are not alone in it. In a society that still places enormous social weight on a couple’s ability to have children, the judgment is real. The whispers are real. The feeling that something is wrong with you is real. We know that. We feel that.

The embryology lab is a place most patients never see. But every moment I spend in it is in service to that couple sitting in a consultation room somewhere, hoping. My job is to give their hope a sound scientific foundation not by inflating their expectations, but by working with precision, discipline, and honesty every single day.

I do not describe myself as ambitious. I know that sounds strange coming from someone who spent six years putting in twelve-hour days in a national research institute. But ambition, as I understand it, implies wanting more for its own sake. That has never been me.

What I want is to do good work. To stay current in a field that never stops evolving because in fertility science, standing still is a form of negligence. To build an organisation where new ideas are welcome, where the procedures are standardised across every centre so that a couple in a Tier-3 city receives the same quality of embryology care as one in Mumbai.

At 25, I thought success looked like publications, a central institute, academic recognition. Now, success is when a couple walks out of our clinic with a broad smile and says: the results are positive.

I am not creating new knowledge in the formal sense anymore. But I am doing something I have come to value just as deeply: translating current science into real outcomes for real families. Adapting. Improving. Staying honest.

Samarth means “capable.” We are here to ensure that every couple who comes to us leaves more capable than when they arrived, better informed, better supported, and better served. That is the work. And I am not done with it.