Droupadi Murmu is the new President of India. She defeated the opposition candidate Yashwant Sinha in the election, the result of which was announced on Thursday (July 21). Murmu, 64 years of age, is the first Adivasi (tribal), second woman to become the nation’s First Citizen and the Supreme Commander of India’s Armed Forces and is the youngest ever president of India.
Here are five things about the new incumbent of Rashtrapati Bhavan, who takes office in the historic 75th year of the nation’s Independence.
- Murmu has been a trailblazer from a very young age. Born into a Santhal family in 1958, she was the first girl in Uparbeda, one of the seven revenue villages in Uparbeda panchayat in Odisha’s backward Mayurbhanj district, to go to college — the Ramadevi Women’s College, now the Ramadevi Women’s University in Bhubaneswar.
- Before beginning her career, Murmu was a teacher at the Sri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre in Rairangpur in Mayurbhanj, and later worked as a junior assistant in the irrigation and power department of the Odisha government.
- Murmu won an election to the Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat in 1997. She was elected to two terms in the Odisha Assembly in 2000 and 2004, and served as a Minister from 2000 to 2004 in Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s BJP coalition government.
- She suffered many hardships on the way, in six years she lost 5 members of her family.
