Nirupama Rao
Former Foreign Secretary of India
Biography
Nirupama Rao was Foreign Secretary in the Government of India (2009-2011), High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka and Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. On retirement, Rao has taught at Brown and Columbia Universities, was a Pacific Leadership Fellow at UC San Diego and is a Global Fellow of The Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC. Ambassador Rao is the founder trustee of The South Asian Symphony Foundation and the South Asian Symphony Orchestra, a project aimed at greater people-to-people connectivity in South Asia. Rao is the author of ‘The Fractured Himalaya: India, Tibet, China 1949 to 1962’ (Penguin Random House India, 2021), a history of diplomacy and war between India and China.