The Steering Committee conceptualises and envisions FPC and supports the Working Group members accomplish their work plan. Pen-portraits of nine members are as follows:
Dipa Sinha
Dipa Sinha is a Development Economist with about 20 years of experience in teaching, research and policy advocacy. Her areas of expertise include social policy, especially related to public health, food and nutrition, gender and child rights. She has been a full time Academic, teaching at the Ambedkar University Delhi, for about nine years, where she taught undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as supervised research scholars. Prior to that, she has worked as a senior researcher and adviser with the Office of Commissioners to the Supreme Court, on the Right to Food. She has independently managed research studies and has been part of large international research collaborations. She has been a member of various policy-related committees of the state and union governments in India as well as on the governing bodies/advisory groups of independent organizations. She works closely with civil-society networks and campaigns in India and globally. She is involved actively with the Right to Food campaign, India. She writes regularly in national and international journals, newspapers and magazines.
Jahnvi Andharia
Since January 2021, she holds the position of Director and Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Studies Trust. She has steered collaborative leadership processes through which the organisation focuses on four thematic focus areas - Gender Based Violence and Work, Gender and Digitalization of Work, Informality Precarious Work and Care and Women Powering the World of Work.
Her work lies at the intersections of addressing vulnerability, marginalisation of rural women, collective empowerment strategies, promoting grassroots leadership, capacity building, evidence building and organisation systems building.
For over two decades, she worked directly with women from poor and marginalised communities of rural areas of Gujarat and Maharashtra shaping her perspective on what feminism, collective action, and women's leadership is, not just in theory but in practice as well.
She supports small and medium sized women led organisations to improve their governance practices and programs to align with goals of women's equality.
Jashodhara Dasgupta
Jashodhara Dasgupta is an independent researcher with over 30 years' experience in feminist approaches to gender, rights and public health. She has been co-founder of three feminist organizations in Uttar Pradesh that work on women's rights, including the right to health, livelihoods and freedom from violence. Jashodhara headed one of them, SAHAYOG (Lucknow) for over a decade, and has worked with several thousand rural women and adolescent girls to develop leadership in claiming their social, economic and political rights. She has anchored civil society advocacy coalitions on sexual and reproductive health and rights within India and internationally. She has been the first woman head of an Indian philanthropic organization that aimed to promote social justice through shaping philanthropy and strengthening civil society.
Jashodhara has conducted several research studies and published widely on gender issues, public health and women's rights in books, peer-reviewed international journals and the media. She has also co-chaired a Lancet Commission on Global Governance for Health, and continues as Advisor on the subsequent Independent Scientific Panel. She has been part of the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage in the erstwhile Planning Commission. Jashodhara has advised UN agencies, the National Human Rights Commission and line ministries.
Renu Khanna
Renu Khanna, a Masters in Business Administration from Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, India, is a founder trustee of SAHAJ – Society for Health Alternatives based in Vadodara (Gujarat). This is a community based action research and advocacy organisation working on social accountability issues in Maternal Health, Child Rights, Adolescents' Development. She continues to mentor community based women's and health organisations.
Renu was active in the Women's Studies Research Centre in MS University in Vadodara for almost three decades. She was a part of Shodhini, a feminist women's network who wrote Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Women, Plants and Healing published by Kali for Women. As an Erasmus Mundus scholar she taught in KIT Amsterdam and QMU Edinburg in 2008. She has been part of collectives to conduct several pioneering short courses on aspects of Gender and Health. Renu has also published critiques of India's women's health policies and programmes and contributed through GOI technical and working groups.
Renu is actively engaged in several pro-peoples' networks, and is on the governance structures of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, CommonHealth – Coalition for Reproductive Health and Safe Abortion, Health Equity Network India (HENI). She is also a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission for Gender and Global Health 2020-2022.
Ritu Dewan
Ritu Dewan is Vice President of the Indian Society of Labour Economics, Visiting Professor at Institute of Human Development, Commissioning Editor of The Leaflet.in, Trustee of The India Forum, and President of Indian Association for Women's Studies (2014-17). She was the first-ever woman Director of the Department of Economics, University of Mumbai, and founder-member of the first Centre for Gender Economics in Asia.
She has over 150 publications, including 40 books & monographs, encompassing a wide range of issues including Development Economics, Gender Economics, Rural & Urban Development, Infrastructure, Labour Markets, Environmental Displacement, Peace Studies, etc. She was a member of the Feminist Economists' Group for Engendering 12th and 11th Five Year Plans appointed by the Planning Commission, Government of India. She is also Consultant to UNDP, UN Women, ILO, World Wildlife Fund, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Action Aid, etc. She is closely associated with training and capacity-building related to gender budgeting and gender issues, and has conducted numerous workshops for the Central Government and also several state governments including Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, etc. Her research focus is generally related to the marginalised, the last two focusing on theoretical-empirical analysis of Paid-UnPaid Work and Demonetisation.
Sanya Seth
Sanya Seth a development professional, with over 11 years of experience working on issues of gender equality and women's rights. Her work focuses on mainstreaming gender within policies and in programmes on violence against women and girls and women's economic rights. She is currently working with the UN Women office for India, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka as the programme lead for Intergovernmental Processes and Women, Peace and Security. Her work at UN Women largely involves policy analysis, capacity building, advocacy and programme management on substantive gender equality. She holds an MA in Women's Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
Sona Mitra
Sona Mitra is a researcher, currently working as the Principal Economist at IWWAGE-an initiative of LEAD at Krea University. She has worked in the area of women and development for the last one and a half decades. Her research focus is critically examining the gender gaps in the labour market, using existing labour-force surveys provided by the Government of India. She has also worked in-depth on issues related to gender budgeting and financing using data on public finance.
Sona is also currently a member in the broad based committee for gender budgeting in India, set up by the MWCD; she is adjunct faculty at Ambedkar University, Delhi. Prior to IWWAGE, she has worked with the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), National Institute for Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), and Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS). She has been an independent consultant with UN agencies working on women's empowerment and has served as technical adviser to several studies conducted by multilateral and non-profit organizations. Sona regularly publishes articles in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in books, and opinion pieces in leading newspapers and magazines.
Suneeta Dhar
Suneeta Dhar has over four decades of work on advancing women's human rights and gender justice. She works across women's groups, community collectives, national and international agencies. Her work has centered around designing multi-stakeholder programs, including on ending violence against women and building safer cities, and integrating gender within large scale on-ground rural programs. She has earlier worked with UNIFEM at their Delhi and New York offices.
Suneeta works with JAGORI as a Senior Advisor. She is a Co-Founder and Chair of South Asia Women Foundation (India). She has served on Expert Committees of NCW (2017, 2019) and of the Supreme Court on Widows' Rehabilitation (2017). She has facilitated several trainings, including for programs of the National Gender Centre, LBSNAA, Mussoorie. She is a member of the CSAG and National Beijing+25 Group of UN Women (India), and a member of the SANGAT Core Group.
Suneeta has a Master's Degree from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has been recipient of the Fulbright (1982) and Advocacy Institute Fellowships (1996) for development practitioners. She has written several training manuals, papers for national/international journals/publications on Women's Safety, Access to Basic Services, Governance, Gender and SDGs and the New Urban Agenda.
V R Raman
V R Raman is a seasoned public policy, systems and governance expert with multi-disciplinary, multi-domain experience and expertise. He holds a work profile spanning over 3 decades, spread across sectors such as health, WASH, nutrition, education, disaster resilience and climate change, in both rural and urban settings of India and globally, with a focus on gender and social justice. Raman's professional journey has seen him contributing at grassroots, sub-national, national, and international levels in a variety of roles. He has played pivotal roles in five flagship national missions of India and has actively fostered and spearheaded development programs under unique state-civil society partnership arrangements in several underprivileged regions of India. His dedication to accountability and rights-based approaches is evident through his involvement in the community-based monitoring processes of various development programmes. His contributions to national and state level budget analysis processes started in 1999 which spanned across multiple sectors and specific topics related to equity and inclusion. He has been part of several important committees and boards and has authored important publications. He is an alumnus of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and University of Calicut, India.
