Meet Reshel

Meet Reshel Bretny Fernandes, born in 2002 in Surathkal, on the coast of Karnataka, to two teachers.

She is an author, a researcher, an orator, a youth parliamentarian and a law student, and she is widely called the Young Voice of India for her writing on youth, education and governance.

The record behind that name is specific. A shelf of books on the nation and the young people in it, ten research papers presented at national and international conferences and journals, and more than a hundred and fifty awards and recognitions.

She currently serves as General Secretary of the Youth Congress in Dakshina Kannada.

Underneath all of it is one idea she has held since she was a student, and it is the shortest way to explain her: young people have a responsibility to the country, and writing is one of the ways to meet it.

A house full of teachers

Both her parents are teachers. Her father, Ronald Fernandes, and her mother, Nancy Fernandes, taught for a living, and her elder sibling teaches as well.

That is not a small detail in a life that turned out the way hers has. It meant that books were ordinary objects in the house rather than special ones, and that current affairs and questions of social responsibility were discussed at the dinner table rather than saved for school.

She grew up in that, and the interests it produced are the ones she still works in: literature, education, and what a country owes its young people and they owe it back.

Her schooling was at Delhi Public School, MRPL, in Surathkal. The family lives in Moodbidri, Karnataka.

What her parents gave her, as she describes it, was less a set of instructions than a working belief: that education is not a private advantage but a responsibility towards everybody else.

The year it turned

Her Pre-University years at Ladyhill Victoria PU College in Mangaluru are where the shape of the rest of it first appeared.

Academically it went well. She finished with the 7th Rank in the state of Karnataka in the Arts stream, and the 1st Rank in Dakshina Kannada district.

But the more consequential thing happened alongside the marks. She started entering literary events, public speaking competitions and discussions — on education, on youth responsibility, on good governance — and found that she was good at them, and that she had things she actually wanted to say.

During that period her work was recognised by the writer Chandrashekhara Kambara, which is the kind of encouragement that arrives early and changes what a student believes is possible.

That was the point at which literature and public engagement stopped being school activities and became the direction she intended to take.

What she studied, and why

Her education reads like somebody assembling a particular set of tools rather than collecting degrees.

A B.A. in Hindi from Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in Madras. A B.A. in History, Economics and Political Science from Sri Mahaveera College in Moodbidri, under Mangalore University, where she finished with the 2nd Rank in the university.

Then law. Her legal studies took her to SDM Law College and the Centre for Post Graduate Studies and Research in Law in Mangaluru, and she is now at SDM Law College for her LL.M.

Alongside those she has taken certificate courses in Disaster Management, Human Resource Management, Public Health and Cyber Law.

Literature gave her the language. History, economics and political science gave her the subject. Law is what she went after when she decided she wanted to understand governance properly rather than only write about it.

A notebook and a question

Her writing began with a notebook and a question she could not put down: what can the youth do for the nation?

Her parents encouraged the habit of writing things down, so she wrote — observations, arguments, notes from what she was reading and from the discussions she was joining.

Out of that came her first book, Essays on Collective Topics. It is the sort of first book that comes directly out of classroom learning and private reflection, and it mattered less for what it contained than for what it established: that she was someone who finished things.

Her volunteering with Disha Bharat and Samartha Bharata belongs to the same stretch of her life. The work there was about character, social responsibility and nation-building, and it gave the question in the notebook something firmer to stand on.

From there the writing did not stop.

The book that reached four offices

Bharat @2047: Role of Youth came out of her preparation for youth parliament discussions, and it is the book that changed the scale of her work.

It argues the thing she had been arguing in halls and competitions for years — that a developed India by 2047 is not a government project that young people will be handed, but one they are supposed to be building.

The book received letters of appreciation from four constitutional offices: the Prime Minister's Office, the President of India, the Vice President of India, and the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.

It is worth saying plainly what that means. A student publishing on her own was read, and answered, at the top of the Indian state. Four separate offices wrote back.

After that she was no longer a promising student who wrote. She was a young author inside the national conversation about what the country is going to be.

The rest of the shelf

The books since have stayed on the same ground, and each takes a different part of it.

Surajya: Good Governance Wheel of Democracy is about good governance and democratic values. Voice of Nation: Youth and Politics is about young people entering political and public life. Light of Education Brightens the World is about education as the engine of social development.

Incredible Bharat: Vision for Viksit Bharat sets out the country's aspirations for its own development. Environment Bond of Coexistence turns to environmental awareness and the idea of coexistence.

Read together they are not separate subjects at all. They are one argument approached from several directions — that a country is built by informed citizens, and that the work of informing them cannot wait for those citizens to get older.

Her view of literature is functional in the best sense. A book is a thing that can educate somebody, and change what they do.

Research, and the record of it

Writing books and doing research are different disciplines, and she has insisted on both.

She has presented ten research papers at national and international conferences and in journals, across law, governance, education and social development.

She served as Student Editor of the Lex Plus Law Review in 2024, which is editing rather than authorship — reading other people's arguments closely enough to improve them, which is a separate skill and a harder one to show off with.

Research is the slow half of her work and it does not produce award ceremonies. It is also what keeps the rest of it from being only enthusiasm. A position argued in a paper has to survive people who are looking for the holes in it.

She has said she intends to go further into it, which is the subject of a later chapter.

Saying it out loud

She is as much an orator as she is a writer, and the two feed each other.

In 2024 she reached the semi-finals of Speak for India, the debate platform run by the Times of India and Federal Bank.

She is an active youth parliamentarian, and she is invited to speak at colleges and youth forums, where the subjects are the ones she writes about: Viksit Bharat, education, governance, and what responsibility actually asks of a young citizen.

The difference between the two forms is the part she seems to enjoy. A book can be put down. A room cannot be, and a room will argue back.

Both are versions of the same conviction — that young people should be encouraged to express their ideas in public, and that somebody has to go first.

What she had to push against

None of this came without friction, and the friction is specific.

The first was age. Writing about governance, politics and the shape of the country while still a student invites a reasonable question about what you could possibly know yet, and the only answer that works is a body of consistent, checkable work. She built one.

The second was publishing. Without a major house behind her, editing, design, printing and promotion were hers to manage, and they had to be managed alongside a full academic load.

The third was simply the arithmetic of time. Ranks, books, research papers, competitions and volunteering do not share a calendar politely.

The fourth was that public speaking and political discussion are still read as male rooms, and entering them as a young woman carries expectations she did not set.

And underneath all of it, the ordinary thing nobody lists: continuous travel, ceremonies, deadlines, and the self-doubt that comes with being the youngest person in most rooms.

What she believes

Her beliefs are plain enough to state in a line each, which is usually the sign of somebody who has tested them rather than collected them.

Education is not a stack of degrees; it is a responsibility to the society that made it possible. Young people must take an active part in building the country rather than waiting to inherit it. Literature can create awareness and move people to act on it.

Education should produce responsible, informed citizens and not only qualified ones. Good governance and democratic participation are not optional extras but the conditions a developed country runs on. Young people should be encouraged to say what they think in public. Learning and research do not stop when the course does.

And the last one, which is most of her in a sentence: success means something only when it contributes to somebody else's life.

There is one more line she returns to, and it explains why she writes rather than only speaks:

If the youth do not write their own future, someone else will.

Honours, and a name

More than a hundred and fifty awards and recognitions have come to her, across literature, education, youth leadership and public service.

Among them: the Kittur Rani Chennamma State Award. The Bharat Bhushan Award 2026. The National Icon Award 2025 at the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya in New Delhi, the Desh Ratna Award 2025 at Bharat Mandapam, and the Veer Savarkar National Award, also at Bharat Mandapam.

The literary honours include the Rabindranath Tagore Literature Award, the Rabindranath Tagore Book Award for Bharat @2047, the Rabindranath Tagore Nobel Legacy Award, the International Kalam Award, the Kalam Literature Honour, the Bharatiya Sahitya Samman and the Thailand Literature Fest Award at Chiang Mai. Alongside those sit the Stree LeadHER Award from the Indian Book of Records, the Patriot of India Award, Bharat Shree 2025, the J Maurus Awards by ICPA, the Naari Shakti Award, Yuva Prerana from Disha Bharat, and an honorary doctorate from the Emerging Achievers Council in New Delhi.

The magazines came with it. Empowered Pen, Author of New Era, Authors of India, Literature Today, Kavya Kala, Inside Founders, Tycoons Capital, Global Personality, Personalities of India, Voice of New India and Crystal Aura have all carried her. Diva Planet ran her as Her Words, Her Power and listed her among its Top 100 Influential Women and Top 50 Inspiring Women of 2025. FemHonour called her the Young Voice of Bharat. She Empower Global ran her as Words by Young Voice.

And at the She Inspire Women Changemakers Summit in Ahmedabad she was recognised as the Young Voice of India in Literature, which is where the name she is now known by came from.

The people who got her here

She is direct about the fact that none of this was done alone.

Her parents were her first teachers in the literal sense as well as every other one. Her elder sibling and her extended family carried their part of it.

Her teachers at Delhi Public School MRPL and at Ladyhill Victoria PU College were the ones who noticed early and pushed. Her professors at Sri Mahaveera College and SDM Law College took her academic and research work seriously enough to shape it.

Disha Bharat and Samartha Bharata gave her a working understanding of character, social responsibility and nation-building, outside any syllabus.

And then the wide, unglamorous base of it: college friends, fellow youth parliamentarians, fellow researchers, libraries, literary platforms and well-wishers who passed her work along.

Her summary of it is a sentence worth keeping — parents who taught, teachers who shaped, and friends who stood by her.

Becoming useful

Her plans are unusually concrete for someone her age, which is consistent with everything else about her.

Academically, she intends to finish her postgraduate legal studies and go on to a Ph.D. in Constitutional Law or Governance, and to work as a legal researcher and a professor — making law and governance something young learners can actually get hold of.

She has set herself a count: twenty books before she is thirty. The subjects she wants to take next are the Indian Constitution, women in governance, education reform, justice and good governance.

She wants to build a national youth dialogue platform where students from smaller towns can put their questions directly to policymakers, because she was a student in a smaller town and knows what that access is worth. She wants to keep volunteering, and to mentor school students in writing and speaking.

And she wants to stay connected to Surathkal while doing all of it.

Her own summary of what she is aiming at is better than any of this:

My future is not about becoming famous, but becoming useful. If my books help even one student think about the nation, my goal is achieved.