Ms Srilatha Batliwala, a social activist, advocate of women’s rights, scholar, and author of many books on empowerment of women is from Bengaluru. She graduated from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai with a Master of Arts degree in Social Work. She has been engaged in promoting the feminist movement, building leadership qualities in women, monitoring and assessing gender sensitive issues, and creating a pool of women activists. She was instrumental in establishing four institutions and two grassroots-level feminist campaigns.
Ms Batliwala has worked for various international institutions, such as the Ford Foundation in New York, the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University and has been Chair of the Board of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Ms Batliwala is actively involved in many organisations dealing with women’s rights – she is Scholar Associate with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), Co-Chair of the board of ‘Gender at Work’ (a global network of women), and member of the board of Samudaya Nirman Sahayak and IT for Change (SPARC) in Mumbai, founded in 1984 to facilitate urban poor to take part in development works of the community. She has many publications to her credit and is a Fellow, Women’s Policy Research, and Advocacy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru.
