Nirupama Rao
Independent and Non-Executive Director
Mrs. Nirupama Rao was Foreign Secretary in the Government of India (2009-2011) and earlier served as Spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka and Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. On retirement, Rao was a Fellow at Brown University and also taught there from 2015-16. She was George Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University in Fall, 2018. In 2019 she was a Pacific Leadership Fellow at UC San Diego. She is a Global Fellow of The Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC, a Member of the Board of Governors of IIM, Bangalore , ICRIER , New Delhi and the Board of the U.S India Business Council. She holds a degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) from Pondicherry University and is a recipient of the Vanitha Ratna Award of the Government of Kerala. In 2012, she was named to the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential women on Twitter, the social media platform where she has a following of 1.3 million.
Ambassador Rao is the founder trustee of The South Asian Symphony Foundation and has established the South Asian Symphony Orchestra. This is a project aimed at greater people-to-people connectivity in South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora.