Dehradun: Senior IAS officer Radha Raturi was on Wednesday appointed as the first woman chief secretary of Uttarakhand.
An order to this effect was issued on Wednesday asking Raturi to take the charge immediately.
Raturi, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 1988 batch, replaces Sukhbir Singh Sandhu whose tenure ended on Wednesday.
She is the first woman to hold the top administrative post in Uttarakhand.
During her long administrative career, Raturi has held several important positions. She has worked as a bureaucrat both in undivided Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which came into existence in November 2000.
Her husband Anil Raturi, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, retired in November 2020 as the Uttarakhand director general of police.
Having a passion for writing as a student, she wanted to become a journalist. She was on the editorial board of her college magazine in the early 1980s and its editor for two years.
After completing her graduation in history from Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1985, she did a course in mass communication and worked briefly as a journalist in the Bombay edition of the Indian Express and then for India Today.
She took the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) examination thrice and succeeded in every attempt.
She appeared for the first time in the UPSC examination on the advice of her father, who was a civil servant, and made it to the Indian Information Service. Her first posting was in Delhi but she decided to sit for the exam again.
Clearing the exam again in 1987, she made it to the Indian Police Service and went to Hyderabad for training where she met her future husband Anil Raturi, also an IPS officer of the 1987 batch.
However, her father advised her to appear for the exam for a third time to get into the Indian Administrative Service.
She belonged to the Madhya Pradesh cadre but decided to change it after marriage as her husband belonged to the Uttar Pradesh cadre.
Published 31 January 2024, 08:35 IST