What is Ivanka Trump Doing in India? First Daughter Two-Day Trip to GES2017 Includes Dinner at Scorpion-Shaped Palace

Ivanka Trump arrived in India Tuesday to attend the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in the city of Hyderabad, the capital of southern India's Telangana state.

The first daughter is due to address the summit and attend a panel discussion titled "Be the change: Women's entrepreneurial leadership" on Tuesday. The next day she will attend a panel discussion called "We can do it! Innovations in workforce development and skills training," discussing ways to increase female participation in the workforce, according to a press statement from the State Department.

Trump is staying at the five-star Trident hotel, The Hindu reported, and is expected to leave Wednesday afternoon. Her two-day schedule includes a dinner on Tuesday at Hyderabad's Falaknuma Palace, courtesy of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The palace, which was built in the shape of a scorpion, is now a luxury hotel. It was the former residence of the Nizam dynasty and claims the world's longest dining table, measuring 80 feet in length, 5.7 feet in width and 2.7 feet in height, according to Architectural Digest India.

The dinner will consist of a five-course meal including traditional regional dishes, according to the Hindustan Times.

Hyderabad has been preparing for weeks for Trump's arrival, planning the deployment of more than 10,000 security personnel to protect the summit and its attendees, local media reported. A bridge was painted in rainbow colors because Trump's motorcade—which, according to The Hindu, is made up of 17 vehicles—would pass by it, The Washington Post's India bureau chief Annie Gowen tweeted Monday.

The authorities also began rounding up the city's 6,000 beggars ahead of the summit, banning them from begging in the streets until January.

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit is an annual gathering of 1,500 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, launched by the Obama administration. Now in its 8th edition, it runs from November 28-30, with the theme "Women first, prosperity for all."

Organizers say they have ensured a female majority among the gathering's participants—a noteworthy commitment in a country where gender discrimination remains pervasive. According to the United Nations Development Programme's Gender Inequality Index 2015, India was 125th in the 159-country's ranking, recording 12.2 percent female participation in its Parliament and 26.8 percent female participation in the labor force, compared to 79.1 percent for men.

Smriti Sharma, research fellow at the United Nations University, wrote in The Conversation last year: "While increasing representation of women in the public spheres is important and can potentially be attained through some form of affirmative action, an attitudinal shift is essential for women to be considered as equal within their homes and in broader society."

Trump's presence at the summit marks the third time she travels abroad to attend an international gathering focusing on women's economic empowerment in her capacity of special adviser to her father, President Donald Trump.

The first daughter attended the W20 Women's Summit in Germany in April, where she was booed for suggesting her father is a "champion of supporting families" and the World Assembly for Women in Japan, where she talked about sexual harassment in the workplace to an half-empty room.

Trump has made women's participation in the economy a priority on her agenda and calls herself a feminist. Her commitment to female empowerment in the workplace has often been questioned due to her support for scrapping Obama-era rules preventing pay discrimination and her company's reluctance to discuss working conditions in factories based in India and elsewhere in Asia producing clothes and accessories sold under the "Ivanka Trump" label, as The Washington Post reported in July.

Trump still owns the company but is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations due to her White House role. "Ivanka Trump HQ is committed to only working with licensees who maintain internationally recognized labor standards across their supply chains," Abigail Klem, president of the Ivanka Trump brand, said in a statement quoted in Bloomberg in May.

Four months ago, Klem told The Washington Post she was planning to tour the facilities that make Ivanka Trump products, but the company declined to comment on the state of the trip or the hiring of a workers' rights group when contacted by the newspaper this week.