Devaki Jain

Jain was born in 1933 in Mysore, the daughter of M. A. Sreenivasan, a minister in the princely state of Mysore and later Dewan of Gwalior. She attended convent schools in several parts of India and graduated from Mysore University in 1953 with gold medals in mathematics, English and overall performance. She then read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Anne's College, Oxford.

Jain taught economics at Delhi University until 1969. She founded the Institute of Social Studies Trust in New Delhi and served as its director until 1994, using it as a base for research and advocacy on women's work, poverty and development.

She held a fellowship at the Scandinavian Institute for Asian Studies in Copenhagen in 1983, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship at Harvard and Boston University in 1984, and a visiting fellowship at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, in 1993. She was Plumer Visiting Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 2013-14. Internationally she chaired the advisory committee on gender for the United Nations centre in Asia-Pacific and sat on the UNDP advisory panels for the 1997 Human Development Report and the 2002 governance report.

In 1990 she joined C. Subramaniam, Kamla Chowdhry, M. S. Swaminathan, Ratan Tata, S. P. Godrej, Verghese Kurien, Bilkees Latif and David Arnold among the founding trustees of the National Foundation for India.

Her books include 'Women, Development and the UN' (2005), 'The Journey of a Southern Feminist' (2018) and the memoir 'The Brass Notebook' (2020). She was married to the Gandhian economist Lakshmi Chand Jain from 1966 until his death in 2010.

Jain received the Bradford Morse Memorial Award from the UNDP in 1995, an honorary doctorate from the University of Durban-Westville in 1999, and the Padma Bhushan in 2006 for her contribution to social justice and the empowerment of women.[2][3]