Sonal Shah has been conferred with the India Abroad Person of the Year 2003. The journey to this stage has not been very smooth to Sonal and has been through rigorous paths. In 1970 just two years after Sonal was born, her father Ramesh moved to New York from Gujarat, India. He initially has earned his livelihood by doing some odd job, mostly as a boiler inspector in apartment complexes, chemical plants, and Laundromats.

Ramesh worked for a couple years as an engineer before shifting the family to Houston. There, the family became very involved in the Gujarati community, helping establish the Gujarati Samaj and annual religious events like the Navratri celebrations. It was, says Ramesh, the family's way of recreating India.

In 1990, Sonal graduated and spent a year wandering through rural India, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique. She would land up in one small town after another, looking for work and seeking out shelter wherever possible the home of some distant acquaintance or someone she'd just met even occasionally crashing out at a local train station.

Sonal received a Masters degree at Duke before returning to work in Houston, for Anderson Consulting. During this period, she started taking a leadership role involving other young Indian-Americans in social projects. One of her favourites was called Impressions, a scholarship initiative she directed that drew solely upon Indian-American youth efforts in the Houston area.

She joined the Center for Global Development (CGD) when it was formed, and as Director of Operations and Programs, has been responsible for most of the Center's hiring, and for managing its policy and advocacy programmes. The organisation conducts research on globalisation and its impact on poor people throughout the world, and promotes policies it feels contribute to equitable growth. Now Sonal will be leaving Centre for Global Development and will take her new assignment in the Centre for American Progress.

Sonal was brought in from the Treasury, where in her six years she dealt with one regional crisis after another. In 1996, in the immediate aftermath of the war in Bosnia, she served as a Treasury Attaché in Sarajevo. There, she worked with Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and others to restore the local banking system, establish a new currency, and help balance the demands of various ethnic groups. Later, she became a regular fixture in Southeast Asia, helping bring the financial crisis under control even as riots swept around her. When she left the Treasury, it was as the Director of the Office of African Nations, helping negotiate debt and AIDS for sub-Saharan nations.