Hyderabad: Senior IAS officer and Additional Chief Secretary Home Department Uttarakhand, Radha Raturi is set to be appointed as the first woman Chief Secretary of the state after the retirement of incumbent Chief Secretary SS Sandhu on Jan 31. Raturi, if appointed to the coveted post, will join the club of three women presently serving as Chief Secretaries of states-Veera Rana Chief Secretary of Madhya Pradesh, Renu Sharma Mizoram and Santhi Kumari Telangana.
Let us have a look at the women, who have served as Chief Secretaries, a post otherwise dominated by men.
TAMIL NADU
Tamil Nadu has seen four Women chief secretaries-Lakshmi Pranesh, S. Malathi, Sheela Balakrishnan and Vaidyanathan. In 2002, then Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa appointed Lakshmi Pranesh as the chief secretary of Tamil Nadu making her the first woman to hold the post in the state. She held the post from December 2002-April 2005. In 2010, IAS officer S. Malathi, belonging to the 1977 cadre, was appointed as the 39th Chief Secretary of the State.
In the year 2012, Sheela Balakrishnan, a 1976 batch IAS officer was appointed as the next chief secretary of Tamil Nadu. In 2016, Girija Vaidyanathan was appointed Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu on the 22nd of December that year. She was the fourth and longest-serving woman Chief Secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu, having held the post from December 2016 to June 2019.
ANDHRA PRADESH
In 2019, 1984 batch IAS officer Nilam Sawhney became the first female CS of the residual state of Andhra Pradesh in 2019.
ERSTWHILE ANDHRA PRADESH ( UNITED ANDHRA PRADESH)
In the year 2002, Andhra Pradesh got its first woman chief secretary, when Sathi Nair, a 1966 batch IAS officer, was appointed chief secretary by N Chandrababu Naidu. In 2012, Minnie Mathew, a 1976 batch IAS officer, was appointed to the post by Kiran Kumar Reddy, the then CM of united Andhra Pradesh.
KERALA
In 1990, Padma Ramachandran became the first woman chief secretary of Kerala state in 1991. She served from 1st November 1990 to July 1991. In the year 2006, Lizzie Jacob took over as Kerala chief secretary in October 2006 and served till September 2007. In 2012, 1975-cadre IAS officer, Neela Gangadharan was appointed as Chief Secretary in May that year. In 2017, senior IAS officer Nalini Netto took charge in Thiruvananthapuram as Kerala’s new Chief Secretary on April 2nd that year, thereby becoming the fourth woman to hold the top post.
RAJASTHAN
In the history of Rajasthan civil administration, two women have held the coveted post of Chief Secretary. In Jan 2022, Usha Sharma was appointed as the Chief Secretary of Rajasthan. She is a 1985 batch IAS officer. Earlier in 2009, Kushal Singh became the first woman Chief Secretary of the state from February 2009 to October 2009.
MADHYA PRADESH
In November 2023, Veera Rana became the second women IAS officer to be elevated to the post of Chief secretary after IAS officer Nirmala Buch, who became Madhya Pradesh's first woman Chief Secretary in the early 1990s.
