Suniti Ashok Deshpande

Deshpande was the first teacher of the Russian language at Russian Cultural and Science Center in Mumbai and the first Indian to obtain a doctorate in Russian from the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. She wrote the first Russian textbook in India. In July 2007, she was awarded the Medal of Pushkin by President Vladimir V. Putin on behalf of the Russian Federation for Lifetime Contribution to Russian Literature.

In 1995, she wrote "Russian Made Easier", the first Russian textbook in India, which was approved and prescribed by many colleges and universities across India. She was the first teacher of the Russian language in Mumbai.

From 1990 to 2015, Deshpande published more than four hundred Marathi and English translations of Russian classics such as Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Blok, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Brodsky and Mayakovsky.

Deshpande began working at the Russian Cultural and Science Centre in Mumbai in 1988. She became a senior lecturer and the Head of the Russian Language Institute at the Centre. Over the course of nearly three decades, she taught Russian to students at the center, staff of India's defense, scientific and diplomatic communities, and traveled to speak about her work.

While in college, she won the University Grants Commission scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at the Pushkin Institute of Russian Language in Moscow in 1982. She was the first Indian to obtain Ph.D. in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language from the Institute. She returned to India in 1985 after completing her studies in Moscow ahead of time.

Suniti Ashok Deshpande (pronounced 'DESH-paan-day'), (सुनीति अशोक देशपांडे, Сунити Ашок Дешпанд) (8 November 1954 – 23 September 2015) was an Indian educator, writer, translator and interpreter, best known for her work on spreading the Russian language and culture in India.