The south Indian state of Kerala is readying for the succession of a rare kind: a wife replacing the husband as the top civil servant. Nothing bizarre. Nothing fishy. It’s a proper government appointment. It’s just unusual.
Dr V. Venu is the chief secretary of Kerala, and he retires on August 31. He will be succeeded by his wife Sarada Muraleedharan, who is the additional secretary of the local self-government department. A Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday appointed Sarada as the new chief secretary.
It’s a first in Kerala bureaucratic circles and the third in India. Shalini Rajneesh recently took over the chief secretary’s reins from her husband Rajneesh Goel in Karnataka. Sujata Saunik became Maharashtra’s first woman chief secretary, succeeding her husband Manoj Saunik, who retired last year.
Sarada’s remarkable record
Kerala is abuzz with news about the civil servant couple and their rare feat. The state has had husbands and wives as chief secretaries twice, but those were not consecutive terms. No baton was passed.
Sarada has a fine track record in women empowerment, poverty eradication and social justice. All that experience will come in handy as her prime task is the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the Wayanad district, which was devastated by landslides last month. “It will be a challenge. But the state has shown the strength and endurance to bounce back. My job is facilitating and being a part of it,” Sarada told Onmanorama.
Having watched her husband tackle such crises, Sarada is no stranger to such programmes. “I had watched from close quarters how a chief secretary handles challenges. Not everyone gets this opportunity,” she said.
The Kudumbashree Mission
An IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer from the 1990 batch, Sarada had headed the Kudumbashree Mission (Kerala’s poverty eradication programme) for six years from 2006, spearheading several initiatives. As the chief operating officer at the National Rural Livelihoods Mission of the Ministry of Rural Development, she helped formulate disaster management plans for Kerala’s local bodies and integrated them into the planning process. Sarada chalked out gram panchayat development plans during her stint as joint secretary at the Panchayat Raj Ministry.
Sarada married Thrissur sub-collector Venu in 1991 when she was an assistant collector under training in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh.
