Kamla Bhasin (24 April 1946 - 25 September 2021) was an Indian developmental feminist activist, poet, author and social scientist. Bhasin's work, that began in 1970, focused on gender education, human development and the media. She lived in New Delhi, India. She was best known for her work with Sangat - A Feminist Network and for her poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai.[5] In 1995, she recited a refurbished, feminist version of the popular poem Azadi (Freedom) in a conference. She was also the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising. She resigned from her job at the U.N. in 2002, to work with Sangat, of which she was a founder member and adviser. She believed in a form of advocacy that combines feminist theory and community action. She worked with underprivileged women from tribal and working communities, often using posters, plays and other non literary methods to get through to communities with low literacy rates. She had always maintained that in order to usher effective change, sloganeering must be accompanied by community mobilization.

Remarkable Works

In April 1998, the FAO-NGO a Programme and the Institute of Development Policy Analysis and Advocacy, Bangladesh, organized a workshop of gender trainers in Koitta, Bangladesh. It drew an overwhelming response from women and men from various countries. Over the course of the workshop, participants discussed and deliberated various issues, shared their respective experiences and opinions, and came to a unanimous conclusion—the space for transformatory gender work was declining steadily. That the need to create a network gender activists and trainers was both urgent and critical was strongly felt and articulated by the group. Sangat was born out of this realization. In a way, it is the continuation of the FAO-NGO Programme which worked for 25 years and was coordinated by Kamla Bhasin during its entire lifetime.