Varsha Deshpande Wins 2025 UN Population Award for Championing Gender Equality.
Appointment
Varsha Deshpande, a women’s rights activist from Satara, Maharashtra, and Secretary of Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal, was recently honored with the United Nations Population Award 2025 in the individual category.
- This prestigious accolade, awarded during the fortieth edition on 11 July 2025 at the UN headquarters in New York, acknowledges her 35 years of grassroots activism against gender-based violence and for reproductive rights .
- Her organization, founded in 1990, has pioneered initiatives targeting child marriage, gender-biased sex selective practices, and women’s financial inclusion. Through sting operations against sex-selective abortion clinics, vocational-skills training, and promotion of joint property rights, her work empowers marginalized Dalit women in rural India.
Main Point :- (i) Varsha has also been instrumental in shaping public policy. As a member of statutory bodies under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, she helped enforce laws preventing sex-selection, and advised on legislation aimed at gender-biased practices.
(ii) At the award ceremony, UN Secretary-General António Guterres—via UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem—commemorated her as "a force for change," highlighting her contributions in preventing hundreds of child marriages, providing legal aid to over 10,000 women, and promoting the “Lek Ladki Abhiyan” (cherish the girl child) movement.
(iii) Varsha Deshpande joins a rare group of Indian individuals—Indira Gandhi (1983) and JRD Tata (1992)—to receive this award, while the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) won the institutional honour this year.
____________________________
