Mitter was born in Baharampur, West Bengal, India on 22 May 1939. Her father, Sasankasekhar Sanyal was a politician and her mother Usha Rani.[3] She was educated at Presidency College and Krishnath College. Against her parents' wishes, she married Partha Mitter in 1960, and they had two children together.[3] They moved to the United Kingdom, where she studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge.[1]
In the early 1970s, Mitter traveled to Sonarpur to research peasant uprisings, publishing a paper on the subject Peasant Movements in West Bengal in 1977. An academic post in 1974 at Brighton Polytechnic led to a professorial position at what had become the University of Brighton in 1993, in gender and technology.[1] Whilst at Brighton, she published two books, Common Fate: Common Bond in 1986, about the poor working conditions of women in export processing zones, and Computer-aided Manufacturing and Women's Employment in 1992.[3] From 1994 to 2000, Mitter was deputy director of INTECH.[1]
On 1 May 2016, Mitter died of cancer and pneumonia at Churchill Hospital, Oxford.[3]
