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Srilatha Batliwala, Civil Society Research Fellow

Srilatha Batliwala is an Indian feminist activist and researcher. She was born in Bangalore, in South India, in 1952, and holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Science, Bombay. She is currently Civil Society Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations in Harvard University. Prior to this, Batliwala was a Program Officer in the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation in New York, handling programs related to strengthening international civil society and the nonprofit sector in the United States. Before joining the Ford Foundation in late 1997, she worked for nearly twenty five years in India in a range of social change and gender justice activities that spanned grassroots organizing, advocacy, and research, with a deep commitment to gender equality and the women’s movement in India.
Her work experience includes the co-founding of SPARC (1984-88), a Bombay-based NGO that organized and mobilized pavement and slum dwellers – particularly women – to struggle for sustainable, people-centered solutions to their housing and survival needs in the urban context. She was also founder and state program director of Mahila Samkhya Karnataka(1989-93), a Government of India special project for women’s empowerment which was instrumental in organizing over 30,000 poor rural women into village-level collectives which fought for changes in their social, legal and political status. She was South Asia Coordinator of DAWN (1993-96), the network of Southern feminist researchers and activists, and set and headed the Women’s Policy Research and Advocacy Unit (1994-97) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.
Her key achievements include building autonomous community-based organizations of poor women, operationalizing the concept of empowerment in grassroots work with both urban and rural women, undertaking pathbreaking research on the status of women in India and Asia, and contributing to several international, national and local policy initiatives aimed at women’s empowerment. She has published extensively on a range of development and women’s issues.
Batliwala is married to her husband of 28 years, has an adult son and daughter. After a three-year separation from her family while she worked in Ford Foundation in New York, her position at the Hauser Center has facilitated an experiment in bi-continental living she alternates three-month stints in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India, where her family is based.