Ruchira Kamboj, First Woman UN Envoy From India Has A Message For Young Women

On Tuesday, Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, India's first female ambassador to the United Nations's headquarters in New York, handed Secretary-General Antonio Guterres her credentials as India's Permanent Representative to the organisation.

Ruchira Kamboj, 58, an Indian Foreign Service officer from the 1987 batch, formerly served as India's ambassador to Bhutan. She was named India's permanent representative to the UN in New York in June.

Her tweet read, "Today, have presented my credentials to the Secretary General of the United Nations @antonioguterres as Permanent Representative/Ambassador to the @UN. A privilege to be the first Indian woman to be given the honour to hold this position. To the girls out there, we all can make it!"

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In December of this year, India's term on the Council will come to a close, and for that month, it will also serve as President of the influential UN body. In the years 2002 to 2005, Kamboj also worked as a counsellor at India's Permanent Mission to the UN in New York. In India, Kamboj was the top female applicant for the 1987 Civil Services batch as well as the 1987 Foreign Service batch.

She began her diplomatic career in Paris, where from 1989 to 1991 she represented the Indian Embassy in France. But Kamboj then returned to Delhi, where she worked as an undersecretary in the Europe West Division of the ministry of external affairs from 1991 until 1996. Between 1996 to 1999, she held the positions of First Secretary (Economic and Commercial) and Head of Chancery in the Indian High Commission in Port Louis, Mauritius. Kamboj was accredited to the Kingdom of Lesotho and served as the Indian High Commissioner to South Africa from July 2017 to March 2019.

She took on the role of the Indian ambassador to Bhutan on May 17, 2019. The US Ambassador to the UN is one of the other female ambassadors to the Council. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Barbara Woodward, Permanent Representative (PR) of the United Kingdom, Mona Juul, Permanent Representative (PR) of Norway to the United Nations in New York, etc.

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Kamboj will assume her position at the Security Council, where India is an elected member, at a time when international tensions have risen in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the body is constrained by the veto rights of its permanent members.