Two Indian Activists Among BBC’s 100 Inspiring & Influential Women For 2021

Bhubaneswar: Two Indians have made it to BBC’s 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2021.

They are human rights activist Manjula Pradeep and autism rights activist Mugdha Kalra.

According to BBC, the list includes those who have been hitting the “reset” and playing their part to reinvent our society, our culture and our world.

A lawyer by profession, Manjula had been fighting for the rights of India’s most deprived communities and women for more than two and half decades. She belongs to a Dalit family of Gujarat and is known for her work against caste and gender discrimination. She is the former Executive Director of Navsarjan Trust, one of the largest Dalit rights organisations in India. She is also the founder of WAYVE Foundation, which focuses on the rights of marginalised youth in India and seeks to empower them. This year, she co-founded the National Council of Women Leaders.

Manjula has represented issues of caste-based discrimination in the United Nations and European Parliament for more than 15 years.
“I want the world to be reset to have compassion and love, where women from underprivileged communities lead the path towards a peaceful and just society,” she was quoted as saying by BBC.

Mugdha is a media professional and communications specialist with experience of over two decades in broadcast journalism. She is also the Chief Content Strategist at Bakstage | Flyx, an audio social networking platform that brings entrepreneurs, communities, content creators and like-minded people together.

She has co-founded Not That Different, a child-led movement that focuses on inclusion and understanding “neurodiversity” with the learnings of raising her non-conformist son in the Autism spectrum. She is behind a one-of-a-kind comic strip aimed at helping all children better understand autism and making them allies of their neurodiverse friends, BBC reported.

“The pandemic has made seven billion people live through a common reality, alone in their worlds but bound to each other through similar suffering. I’d like this shared experience to inspire greater empathy for our fellow humans,” she was quoted as saying by the public service broadcaster.

The list also features Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Samoa’s first female prime minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa, Professor Heidi J Larson, who heads The Vaccine Confidence Project, and acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Notably, women from Afghanistan make up half of this year’s list, which recognises the scope of their bravery and their achievements as they are forced to reset their lives under the Taliban regime, it added.