Droupadi Murmu

Biography

Droupadi Murmu was born Durgi Tudu on 20 June 1958 into a Santal family in Uparbeda village near Rairangpur, Odisha, where her father and grandfather had been village heads; a schoolteacher gave her the name Droupadi. She went to school in Bhubaneswar and graduated from Rama Devi Women's University. She worked as a junior assistant in the Odisha irrigation department from 1979 to 1983, and later taught at a school in Rairangpur from 1994 to 1997.

She entered politics in 1997 as an independent councillor of the Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat, becoming its vice chairperson, and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party that year. Elected to the Odisha Legislative Assembly for Rairangpur in 2000, she served two terms, and in the BJD–BJP coalition government she was minister of state for commerce and transport and then for fisheries and animal resources. Between 2009 and 2015 she lost her husband, two sons, her mother and a brother.

In May 2015 she became the first woman Governor of Jharkhand, serving until July 2021, the longest tenure in that post. In 2017 she returned to the state government bills that would have weakened tribal land protections in the tenancy laws. Nominated by the BJP, she won the 2022 presidential election and took office on 25 July 2022 as India's first president from a tribal community and its second woman president.