Dehradun, Jan 31 (PTI) Senior IAS officer Radha Raturi on Wednesday took charge as Uttarakhand’s first woman chief secretary.
Outgoing Chief Secretary S S Sandhu handed over the charge to Raturi at the Secretariat here as his tenure extended by six months came to an end.
Soon after assuming office, Raturi said the biggest challenge before the state government is to enact legislation on the Uniform Civil Code.
Raturi said the expert committee on UCC will submit its draft to the chief minister on February 2 and a session of the state assembly is starting on February 5, she said. “Chief secretaries are team leaders. The entire bureaucracy has to work as a team,” she told PTI.
An order appointing Raturi as the chief secretary was issued earlier in the day asking her to take charge immediately.
A 1988-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, Raturi has worked as a bureaucrat both in undivided Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which came into existence in November 2000.
During her long administrative career, she has held several important positions.
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, Raturi 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.
Raturi appeared for the civil services examination conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) 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, Raturi’s father advised her to appear for the exam for a third time to get into the IAS. She belonged to the Madhya Pradesh cadre but decided to change it after marriage as her husband belonged to the Uttar Pradesh cadre. PTI ALM ALM KVK KVK
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