A diversity talk written for New York does not survive contact with a plant town in Jharkhand. Imported material assumes the room’s differences are the ones the writer had at home. Indian audiences can tell within minutes, and they switch off.
India’s diversity is older and wider than any framework built elsewhere. Language alone divides the room in most Indian companies, then region, faith, caste, class, disability and generation divide it again, before gender even enters the list. A speaker who reduces all of this to one axis, whichever axis is fashionable that year, loses the audience in the first ten minutes.
The companies getting it right are building their own version, tied to real work. In 2022, Tata Steel‘s West Bokaro division trained 14 transgender employees as heavy earth moving machinery operators and put them to work running 100-ton dumpers in its mines, a first for India. In March 2024, it brought in 14 more transgender trainees, taking its total transgender workforce to 120. No imported playbook told them to do that. They looked at who was kept out of Indian industry and changed it, one real job at a time.
Gender still has the sharpest edge in the data. McKinsey’s 2025 study puts women at 33% of entry-level roles and 24% of manager roles in India, against 48% of university enrolment. That gap deserves everything we throw at it. But a company that hires brilliantly across gender while its managers mock regional accents, sideline older workers or never meet a colleague with a disability has not understood the word. It has understood one paragraph of it.
So what should a diversity speaker in India bring to the room?
- Range across the axes that actually divide Indian workplaces
- Evidence over sentiment, with Indian data first
- Respect for the audience’s own context and experience
- Examples the room recognises, from mines to GCCs
India does not need to borrow a conversation about diversity. It needs its own conversation, in its own languages, about its own workplaces.
Sutapa Sanyal speaks on diversity and inclusion to companies across India, in formats from keynotes to leadership workshops.
To invite her to speak, visit the diversity and inclusion speaker page.