She is the founder of the 50 Million Missing online campaign to raise awareness of female gendercide in India.
In 1995 she received the Amy Lutz award in Plant Biology from the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) for her PhD work on the effects of acid rain on maize.
Banerji's non-fiction book Sex and Power:Defining History, Shaping Societies was first published in India in 2008.
[4] In December 2006 Banerji started 50 Million Missing, an online advocacy campaign to raise awareness of female gendercide in India.
She says, "The data on the systemic and mass-scale violence on Indian women and girls I was gathering for my book was playing out in its stark grotesqueness in my everyday reality.
"[6] Banerji contends that the three worst disasters that India faces in the 21st century, are population explosion, an AIDS epidemic, and the female gendercide.
"[7] Banerji has argued against the view that education and economic development are the solution to India's female gendercide.
Banerji also claims that high-income professional women are also victims of dowry violence and murder in India.
[9] Their education and wealth is no protection, because they are unable to fight off the family and cultural pressures on them to remain in the marriage, regardless of the violence they are subjected to.
Banerji contends that it is not economics or education, but rather a cultural misogyny that is the prime factor in India's female gendercide.
She says this is most evident in how culture specific crimes like dowry murders and ‘honour' killings hound expatriate Indian women too, and sex-selected abortion is so prevalent, that the Indian communities in certain western countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Norway too have sex ratios that are abnormally skewed against females.
[13] She believes it is very important for the women's movement in India to have such a revolution particularly in context of putting the gendercide in perspective for Indian society.
She does not have the ownership of her own body… And so it is the parents, the husbands, and in-laws who have the prerogative to decide and make the choices regarding a girl or a woman’s being.
He and his family can torture her to extort more dowry wealth, or subjugate her to repeated pregnancies and excruciating abortions to rid female progeny as always is the case with female feticides…[There is] yet another constrictive, dictatorial authority that asserts its power over an individual woman’s being in India – that of culture and society.
Author of Sex and Power, Rita Banerji Talks Marriage, Divorce and Raising Strong Daughters.
Masalamommas: An Online Magazine for Today's Moms with a South Asian Connection, 31 October 2011 Colin Todhunter.