Maja Daruwala has been working to advocate for rights and social justice for the past 20 years. A barrister who restarted her studies and took her final bar exams after 10 years of marriage and two children, Maja knew that both her vocation and avocation had come together from the first time she opened a law book and found echoed in it all her own till then inchoate belief in justice and equity.

Born in India, Maja has lived and worked in England, Singapore and Sri Lanka. Back in India, she has practiced for a short while in the Supreme Court but then left to work full-time at the Ford Foundation as a programme officer for South Asia. Since 1996 she has headed up the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an international NGO based in New Delhi that works for the practical realisation of human rights. Maja’s interests lie particularly in the area of systemic reforms. She has concentrated her energies on issues of accountability, particularly promoting police reform and the right to information. Both these issues are, she believes, essential underpinnings for attaining good governance and realising human rights.

Maja is the founder-chair of the People’s Watch in Tamil Nadu, and sits on several charitable boards, including the Open Society Institute-Justice Initiative, New York, and the International Women’s Health Coalition, New York. Maja believes: the only way to be optimistic about the future is to invent it!