Anna Rajam Malhotra
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India’s first woman IAS officer
Anna Rajam Malhotra Curated by Ketaki Desai, with inputs from Sharmila Ganesan Ram/ Anna Rajam Malhotra, India’s first woman IAS officer/ The Times of India
➤The woman under whose watch marshy Bombay villages morphed into a futuristic port was born in a sandy Kerala village that was an ancient port.
➤Much like Nhava-Sheva — India’s first computerised container port that rose from the sea under her stewardship in 1989 —
Anna Rajam Malhotra, India’s first woman IAS officer, seemed to have built her resume on reclaimed territory.
➤Born Anna Rajam George in Niranam village in 1927, the Calicut-bred, Madras-honed English literature graduate became the country’s first woman to attempt the civil services examination in the 1950s. She said in an interview to a leading English daily that she took the examination for a lark.
➤The year after the exam, seated across from a five-member allmale board during the interview round, Anna would find herself being discouraged from joining the Indian Administrative Service(IAS) and would instead be offered the Foreign Service and Central Services as these were “suitable for women”.
➤Undeterred, Anna — who had undergone training in horse riding, rifle and revolver shooting — would stand her ground successfully. “In the event of marriage your service will be terminated,” her appointment order stated when she was posted to the state of Madras.
➤Not convinced that she would be unable to handle law and order situations, Anna was offered a post in the secretariat instead of the charge of a district sub collector. Later, she won the post through negotiations. In an interview with a popular English-language daily, she recalled the time she entered a village in Tamil Nadu on horseback wearing a sari. “She looks just like one of us,” commented a woman, disappointed.
➤“Use your head, Ms Anna,” Anna was told by a senior whom sheapproached for advice once after six elephants entered a village in Hosur. Unable to find it in her to issue orders to finish them off, Anna used her rustic wisdom to redirect the pachyderms back to the forests.
➤She served under seven chief ministers, and with Rajiv Gandhi when he was overseeing the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi.
➤In her fifties, she married her colleague RN Malhotra, who became RBI governor in 1985. Every day for the next few years, ‘Mrs Malhotra’, as she came to be referred to in news reports, would board a jetty at the Gateway of India and alight at the construction site of NhavaSheva, when she was handed its chairmanship following the government’s decision to decongest the century-old Bombay port.
➤A year after the inauguration of the port that spawned a whole new township around it, Anna got the Padma Bhushan award before retiring in 1990 and later flying to the US with her husband. She died at age 91 in 2018, having won praise from most of the men who had doubted her administrative capabilities. As per her wish, Anna — who didn’t want to be put in a coffin — was cremated and her ashes floated in the sea.
Curated by Ketaki Desai, with inputs from Sharmila Ganesan Ram
