Page 48 - A Gender-Sensitive Indian Foreign Policy- Why? and How?

Indian Council
of World Affairs

Amb. Nirupama Menon Rao
Former Foreign Secretary of India

Amb. Nirupama Menon Rao is a retired Indian diplomat,
Foreign Secretary and Ambassador. She joined the Indian
Foreign Service in 1973. During her four-decade-long
diplomatic career she held several important assignments. She
was India’s first woman spokesperson in the Ministry of External
Affairs, New Delhi; the first woman high commissioner from her country to
Sri Lanka, and the first Indian woman ambassador to the People’s Republic
of China. She served as India’s Foreign Secretary from 2009-2011. At the end
of that term, she was appointed India’s Ambassador to the United States
where she served for a term of two years from 2011-2013. On her retirement
from active diplomatic service, Ambassador Rao entered the world of
academics. Ms. Rao was a Visiting Scholar at the India China Institute at
The New School in New York during April-May 2016, and was appointed
a Public Policy Fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington D.C. from June
2017 to end-August 2017. She was a Practitioner-in-Residence of the Bellagio
Center in Italy in November 2017. During 2018, Rao taught a course on India-
China relations, entitled: “India’s China relationship, from coexistence,
to contest, to competition” as George Ball Adjunct Professor at the School
of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, in New York. In
2019, she was the Pacific Leadership Fellow at the School of Global Politics
and Strategy, University of California, San Diego. She is currently a Global
Fellow of The Wilson Center. She is a recipient of the Vanitha Ratna Award
of the Government of Kerala (2016), the “Citizen Extraordinaire” Award
of the Rotary International, Bangalore (2018) and the Kalinga Karubaki
Literary Award (Kalinga Literary Festival, Odisha, 2018). In 2012, she was
named to the Global List of the 100 Most Influential Women on Twitter
by foreignpolicy.com.

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Indian Council of World Affairs An ICWA Conversation