Dr. Deepa Narayan is the author of the ground-breaking book, ‘Chup: Breaking The Silence About India’s Women’. She has over 25 years of experience working at the World Bank, the UN, and NGOs on poverty, gender and inequality in development. She was Senior Adviser at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and wrote the influential series ‘Voices of the Poor’ based on 60,000 people in 60 countries. She has written 17 books and is the recipient of many awards; she has been named as one of the 100 most influential global thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine in the USA as well as one of India’s 35 Great Thinkers by India Today. Dr. Narayan spent many years living in village communities. This led to her focus on ‘people first’, and local community-driven approaches nested in social and political processes.