Sutapa Sanyal is an award-winning speaker and expert on Diversity & Inclusion, Gender Equality and Women’s Leadership. Ms. Sanyal was the first woman to serve as Director General of Police in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh and was awarded the Police Medal for Distinguished Services by the Hon. President of India for her 33 years of service. Currently, she is the Founding Partner of D&I India Consultants, which helps companies build diverse and happy workplaces.
Ms Sanyal has delivered transformational talks, trainings and consultations on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), POSH, Gender Intelligent Leadership and Wellbeing for some of the world’s leading companies and institutions including Boeing, Taj Group, Ernst & Young, Reliance-Jio, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, DS Group, Trilegal, London School of Economics (LSE) and IIM (Kolkata, Lucknow). She has also been featured on national TV channels such as NDTV, Zee News and Aaj Tak.
An advocate for women’s economic and social empowerment, Ms. Sanyal is an inspiring public speaker whose keynotes have been well received at industrial bodies like FICCI, CII and PHDCC. She also has a TEDx talk entitled “Be the CEO of Your Own Life”, aimed at inspiring India’s next generation of Women Leaders.
Internationally, her work on inclusion has won praise from the U.S. Department of State and she has been recognized as an “Indian Woman Leader” by the British High Commission. She has also addressed the INTERPOL in France and taken part in consultative dialogues on gender diversity and equity with Members of Parliament of the U.K. and with official delegations from Canada and the EU.
With over three decades of demonstrated leadership in public administration, Ms. Sanyal has designed and implemented several innovative programmes in gender equity & inclusion. In 2016, she founded the U.P. Police Mahila Samman Prakoshth (MSP), an award-winning police unit, to serve over 175 million women and children in the state of U.P.
At MSP, Ms. Sanyal built close public-private partnerships with international organisations like UNICEF, Plan India and Action Aid to deliver gender, equity and child focused programs that won the FICCI SMART Policing Award. She is also credited with starting India’s first police web portal (Vikalp) for reporting crimes against women and children, which resulted in a 97% police response rate in U.P.
Ms. Sanyal is a Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Risk Management in the U.K. and is on the Advisory Board of the CEOs Association for Inclusive India (CAII). She is also associated with the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation (founded by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi) and the Quality Council of India.
In the past, she has served as Advisor to GAIL India, been on the Advisory Committee of CARA (Ministry of Women & Child Development), and presided as the Chairperson of the ICC of U.P. Police (the second largest police force in the world). She has been awarded the Indian Express Devi Award, the Skoch Challenger Award and the Hindustan Times Woman of the Year award.
Ms Sanyal has an M.A. in Economics, and holds certifications in Gender Studies and Management from Johns Hopkins University and London Business School.
