Women

Falling under a zone that perpetually grapples with various agrarian crises, not a single farmer in the village has committed suicide owing to droughts and crop failure.

Today, nearly 5 million women are a part of Kudumbashree, making it the world’s largest women empowerment project. And all this in a state one-tenth the size of California.

Shila Dawre shut all these stereotypes down when she became India’s first woman auto driver. Rubbing shoulders with khaki-clad men driving rickshaws, clad in her regular salwaar kameez, she drove around the lanes of Pune, owning them.

The initiative not only provides these women from Kalwa for a job, but also has put them on a map with a cookery book that has a collection of all their recipes!

Instead, this young man decided to revive a 3000-year-old sport, Silambam, popularly known as a Maradani Khel or 'masculine sport' in Maharashtra.

She covered over 12,000 km from Kanyakumari to Ladakh in 42 days to raise awareness about violence against women. This trip made Shyni one of the first women from Kerala to have embarked upon such a journey.

Aakarsh Shamanur wanted to make the working conditions of the women street vendors in Bengaluru better, so he started an initiative.

Deemed the second highest position at the UN agency, she will be working under Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. She is the first Indian to hold one of the highest ranks in the WHO.

An Indian diplomat and politician of the first order, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was a trailblazer for women in ways more than one. For example, she became the first woman President of the United Nations General Assembly.

Meet 54-year-old Premlata Agrawal, a homemaker who became the first Indian woman to have achieved the record of climbing the Seven Summits at the age of 50 and the oldest Indian woman mountaineer to scale the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest, in 2011.