Power Women of India - Venu Agrahari Dhingra

Politics, by its very nature, is controversial, and when a woman takes part in it, she becomes controversy's favourite child. 

"Power Women - India's Political Winners" chooses to focus on the upsides of women in politics and highlights the excellence the women leaders have achieved in Indian Politics with their grit, guts, and glory.

Women, unlike men, work harder more sincerely to make a mark in politics with the boldness of her inner Goddess  "Durga".

These women protagonists have come from all walks of life - some with legacy and some without it - but they reached the highest echelons of Indian Politics and became the President,  Prime Minister, Speakers, Chief Ministers, Union Ministers and Members of Parliament.

This book narrates the inspirational stories of these torchbearers - 16 women political leaders of India, retracing the hard work they have to put into every field of life, especially politics. Indian democracy,  the biggest in the world, has given equal chances to men and women from all walks of life to make their mark in politics for the nation. The women mentioned here made their mark in their own inspirational ways, working for the country and their gender. 

Highlighting the achievements of the country's women leaders also paves the way for inspiring more women to join the country's mainstream politics. It covers 16 women politicians across decades and different parties, past and present, who entwine together to weave a womanhood fabric. The 'Durga' aspect of each woman is a common thread, which these remarkable women have in them and used with brilliance to move ahead in life and outshine in the political world. The information collected has been a year's work of research and dedication. Some of them have been written about posthumously. This book is a culmination of deep introspective analysis from various online and offline media.

My tryst with politics began with being born in a politico-business family. My father was the Mayor of Allahabad (now PrayagRaj) and Member of Parliament twice from Banda and Allahabad. While growing up in a house frequented by many stalwarts of Indian politics, including three former Prime Ministers of the country -  Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Shri VP Singh and Shri Chandra Shekhar, it was the women in politics who intrigued me the most. Whenever I accompanied my father to a rally, one thing that struck me was the plight and fate of my gender and what the female politicians did to make a change. I closely observed that women politicians worked harder because politics has traditionally been male-dominated and still is in many countries. The voices of women leaders resonated with me, and I believed that I could be an agent of change too. Seeing them overcome prejudice and voice their opinions fearlessly in the world's most prominent democracy seat inspired me to reflect on Women Politicians in India.

The book is available on Amazon.com, Kindle, and The English Book Depot.
Price Rs. 500.00 

Know our Trustee: Dr Babli Moitra Staff

Pic courtesy IP College website

Dr Babli Moitra Saraf Principal, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, India.

Principal, Babli Moitra Saraf, is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Head of the Department of Multi-Media and Mass Communication. She has received her M.Phil degree in English and PhD in Sociology. She is fluent in several Indian and foreign languages. Her doctoral thesis studies language change in the advertising industry in India in the first phase of globalization (1984-94), and the emergence of the Indian urban middle-class identity. Active as a teacher both within and outside her College, her teaching interests include Translation, Poetry, Modern Indian Literature in Translation, Classical Literature, Renaissance and Modern European Drama, Poetry, The Bible, Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Literary Theory, Literature and the Arts and the Hindi Film Song. She presents her academic work regularly among national and international peers. Her ongoing research examines traditions of Orality, Embodied Languages and Performance in the context of Translation and Translation Studies.

Dr Moitra Saraf taught in the Department of English in Delhi University’s Ramjas College for 29 years before joining I.P. College as Principal on 1 July 2009. She has studied the Corso Superiore at the Università per Stranieri at Perugia, Italy. She has taught Italian at the Istituto Di Cultura Dell’Ambasciata Italiana at New Delhi. She has a Diploma in Spanish from the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi. She translates from several Indian languages as well as from Italian, into English and Hindi. Among others, she has translated the Bengali activist-novelist Mahasweta Devi’s works into Italian in collaboration with Maria Federica Oddera. Her publications, La Cattura (Theoria, 1996) and La Preda e altri Racconti (Einaudi, 2004), are acclaimed translations. Her work Rajouri Remembered (2007), is a translation of a family narrative, from Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and oral history, recounting the effects of the Partition of India in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. She has co-edited with Shormishtha Panja Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures (New Delhi: Sage, 2016). Her latest publication is Hey Diddle Diddle: Tun-Tun Tara-Tara (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2017), which are Hindi adaptations/translations of popular nursery rhymes in English.

She is on the editorial board of Translation: a transdisciplinary journal (Rome), and on the editorial board of Saar Sansaar (New Delhi) – a journal translating from original foreign writings into Hindi.  She is a member of the Scientific Board of In Other Wor(l)ds: Project Book Series on translations from Asia and North Africa. Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’Foscari University, Venice, Italy. Dr Moitra Saraf serves on various academic and administrative committees of the University of Delhi, and the Govt. of India.

Babli Moitra Saraf has been a scholar under the Indo-Italian Cultural Exchange Program, a Research Associate at the NIDA School of Translation Studies (NSTS), Misano, Italy in 2009 and Visiting Faculty at NSTS 2011. She received the Distinguished Teacher Award of the University of Delhi in 2009, the Amity Women Achiever in Education Award in 2010. In 2010 she was invited to be part of the first all-women, six-member Indian delegation to visit Saudi Arabia on a people to people contact program under the Delhi and Riyadh Declaration and represented the Education sector. She received the 27th Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Memorial National Award for Teachers in 2011, the Fulbright- Nehru International Education Administrator Seminar award in 2011. She also received the “C.F. Andrews Distinguished Alumnus Award for Lifelong Pursuit of Excellence” from St. Stephens College in 2015, the “Women of the Decade in Academia”, Award of the Women Economic Forum in 2017 and the Certificate of Felicitation of the International Women’s Club (Unit of UNF), for “Remarkable Contribution in the Field of Administration & Education for Girls”, also in 2017. In 2018 she was felicitated with the “Girl Centric Tertiary Education and Training” award from the Women’s Agency for Generating Employment (WAGE), New Delhi. She also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from TESTCOIN, CIU, NICER, and IIEE, on the occasion of United Nations World Teachers Day Celebration, 2018.

As the 10th Principal of the historic Indraprastha College for Women, the oldest women’s college of the University of Delhi, her professional experience of over three decades with young adults as a teacher and education administrator, has enabled her to actively engage and make interventions in the particularities of the female experience. She has presented extensively on gender and institutional structure and processes. Dr Moitra Saraf’s constant effort is to blend tradition and modernity and preserve and promote the College’s heritage and revolutionary legacy. She has made significant interventions in academic and co-curricular activities, created centres of research and training, augmented learning resources and introduced new courses of study. She has introduced and promoted innovative measures to preserve the historical legacy of the College and its natural green cover and environment. The crucial element of her vision is to mainstream the marginalized sections of students. She has introduced many empowering facilities for economically and socially weaker sections of girls, enabling measures for disability access including a barrier-free institution. I.P. College today boasts of global level infrastructure for a wide range of academic, outreach and extension programs. The College was accredited with A Grade by NAAC in 2016 and has gone on to win national and international awards.   

Bhadrajun Artisans Trust (BAT) is a Society, registered with the Registrar Of Societies in Delhi. The society operates The Fabindia School.

The Members of the Society are:

1. Mr Sandeep Dutt - Chairman

2. Ms Prableen Sabhaney - Treasurer

3. Ms Poonam Singh Chauhan - Secretary 

4. Mr Ravi Kaimal

5. Mr Rajkumar Rodla
6. Dr Babli Moitra Saraf

7. Ms Anjana Batra

- Source www.bateducation.org (website of the Society)

Manisha Deora: Women Empowerment

In India, empowering women is very necessary as it brings gender equality. Men should not think that women are made only for the household work. They both should be treated equally. Women empowerment is also necessary for the bright future of the family, society and country because an educated woman can educate her whole family and thus the whole country. It is said that “if we educate a man, we educate a man only, but if we educate a women, we educate the whole family”.

Women should be given equal opportunities in every field like men and they should not be discriminated. Women cover almost half population of the country, it means that if women are uneducated, the half of the country is uneducated which brings poor economic condition. Women should be given more freedom and should have equal rights like men, so that they can become independent.

Nowadays, women are competing men by doing all the work together like household work, working in offices, etc. They become independent and can serve their whole family. Women empowerment means empowering women to take their own decisions independently.

Women must be educated and they should be given more freedom. It is very important for a democratic country. So let them involve in the development of our country.

Manisha Deora.

Educator, The Fabindia School, Bali