Biography
Arumita Mitra is a social entrepreneur, corporate leader, and TEDx Speaker whose work bridges industrialization and social development. At 17, she began teaching underprivileged children in Kolkata’s slums, and at 25, she turned down a US opportunity to found the Sudhamta Foundation India under the Indian Trust Act.
The Foundation has impacted over 1 million women and girls across 10 Indian states through education, livelihood, menstrual health, and mental well-being programs, now expanding to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, UK and Vietnam. She is Founder of Global Women Network, Director of Artemis Group of Companies, and Director of World Mental Healthcare Association.
Abstract
Tittle: “From Shame to Strength: Reimagining Dignity as the First Step to Leadership”
Abstract: Across India’s villages and urban slums, the first barrier to a girl’s future is often not a lack of ambition — it is silence. Silence around menstruation. Silence around a woman’s right to skill, income, and voice. Arumita Mitra, founder of the Sudhamta Foundation, has spent over a decade proving that dignity is not a byproduct of empowerment — it is its foundation.
In this address, Mitra draws on Sudhamta Foundation’s on-ground work across India — from menstrual health and hygiene programs that have reached thousands of adolescent girls, to vocational skilling initiatives that have transformed unemployment into entrepreneurship, to grassroots leadership pipelines built village by village. She argues that sustainable social change does not begin with policy from above, but with restoring dignity from within: a girl who no longer misses school during her period, a woman who earns her first wage, a mother who becomes her community’s decision-maker.
This is not a story of charity. It is a story of infrastructure — the invisible scaffolding of confidence, skill, and health that must exist before leadership can be built on top of it. Mitra’s address is a call to every changemaker in the room: empowerment is not an event, it is an ecosystem.
