Annapurna Devi, BJP's OBC face from Jharkhand, gets Ministry of Women and Child Development
Annapurna Devi, one of the two women Cabinet ministers in Modi 3.0, previously served as the MoS for Education.
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Jharkhand, Annapurna Devi, was made as the Union Cabinet Minister for Women and Child Development on Monday, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi allocated portfolios to his Union council of ministers.
She is one of the two women Cabinet ministers in the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance at the Centre. Devi, aged 55, who was elected from the Koderma Lok Sabha constituency in Jharkhand, previously served as the Union Minister of State for Education in the Modi government from 2021.
A two-time MP, Devi defeated the CPI(ML) Liberation candidate in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election by a margin of 3.77 lakh votes, the highest among the party’s winning candidates in the state.
Her political journey began after the death of her husband, Ramesh Yadav, a Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) legislator, in 1998. That same year, she won the by-poll and became a member of the Bihar Legislative Assembly. Born into a Bengali-speaking family in the Dumka area of Jharkhand, Devi pursued a master’s degree at Ranchi University. She served as Minister of State for Mines and Geology in the RJD government of undivided Bihar.
Read: Narendra Modi Cabinet 3.0: Full list of Union ministers
From 2005 to 2014, she served two terms in the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly. In 2012, she was appointed a cabinet minister in Jharkhand, overseeing the Ministry of Irrigation, Women and Child Welfare, and Registration. Her most significant political victory came in 2019 when she defeated Babulal Marandi of the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) by a staggering margin of 4.55 lakh votes while contesting on the BJP's ticket.
Before her unexpected shift to the BJP, Annapurna Devi was the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Jharkhand chief. Her rise within the party ranks was meteoric, reflecting her growing influence as the face of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in Jharkhand. OBCs constitute over 45 percent of Jharkhand’s population, according to the last census—a statistic that underscores her political significance.
