Rewriting history, Draupadi Murmu, a Santhal woman from a remote village in Odisha got elected as the first tribal to become the President of India. Overcoming oppressions and personal tragedies, this lady rose to the position of the first citizen of the nation, with a whopping majority of more than twice the number of votes as the opposing candidate. She will take oath on July 25, a day after Ramnath Kovind’s tenure ends.
Draupadi Murmu is a Santhal from the lesser known Mayurbhanj district in Odisha. Originally, she hails from Rairangpur, a tehsil headquarters which is 82 km from Baripada, and 287 km from state capital Bhubaneswar. Her home was earlier in Uparbeda village, which until recently did not have power connection.
Her late husband Shyam Charan Murmu used to work in a bank, and her only surviving child Itishree Murmu is also employed by a bank in Bhubaneswar. Her two sons passed away in a span of three years between 2009 and 2012. As per reports, it was then the tribal leader became a keen practitioner of the meditation techniques of the Brahma Kumaris, a movement she embraced after her personal losses.
Starting off as a primary school teacher, she soon became a junior assistant in the irrigation department. Both her father and grandfather were village heads under the panchayat raj system, and Draupadi Murmu became a member of the Rairangpur municipality in 1997. Soon thereafter she was elected as the chairperson. In 2000 she was elected as an MLA from Rairangpur, and became a minister on state in the Biju Janata Dal (BJD)-BJP coalition government. She held portfolios such as commerce and transport, and then animal husbandry and fisheries till 2005. In 2015, she was appointed as the first woman Governor of the predominantly tribal state of Jharkhand. While in office, she refused assent to two Bills — the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act 1908, and the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act 1949 that sought to use the land for commercial purpose without changing the land rights. She demitted office in July 2021.
Belonging to Mayurbhanj, one of the most remote and underdeveloped districts of the country, Murmu earned her Bachelor’s degree in Arts from Bhubaneswar’s Ramadevi Women’s College in Bhubaneswar and served as a junior assistant in the irrigation and power department in the Odisha government. She also served as an honorary assistant teacher in the Shri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre in Rairangpur. Murmu was awarded the Nilkanth Award for the Best MLA of the year in 2007 by the Odisha Legislative assembly.
She has diverse administrative experience having handled ministries such as transport, commerce, fisheries and animal husbandry in the Odisha government. In the BJP, Murmu was vice president and later president of the Scheduled Tribe Morcha in Odisha. She was elected the district president of Mayurbhanj (West) unit of the BJP in 2010 and re-elected in 2013. She was also named a member of the BJP National Executive (ST Morcha) the same year. She held the post of district president till April 2015, till when she was appointed as the Governor of Jharkhand.
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