Happy Birthday to Former Lok Sabha Speaker, Sumitra Mahajan
Sumitra Mahajan is an Indian politician who was the Speaker of Lok Sabha from 2014 to 2019. Let us wish her a very Happy Birthday.
Sumitra Mahajan was born on 12th April 1943 in Chiplun, Maharashtra. She received her MA and LLB from Indore University (now Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya). Sumitra Mahajan started her political career as a corporator in the Indore Municipal Corporation in 1982. She was later elected as Deputy Mayor of Indore Municipal Corporation in 1984. She ran for the first time and won the Lok Sabha elections in 1989, against former Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Prakash Chandra Sethi. She is popularly known as Tai, among the people of her constituency.
On 6 June 2014, Mahajan was unanimously elected as the Speaker of the 16th Lok Sabha. She had earlier worked as a member of the ‘Panel of Chairmen’ in the Lok Sabha. She took the step of suspending 25 Congress MPs for five days (August 2015) from the House for indiscipline in the House.
She also served as a Union Minister of State from 1999 to 2004, holding the portfolios of Human Resource Development, Communications and Information Technology, and Petroleum and Natural Gas. She also held the position of Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment (2004-2009) and the Standing Committee on Rural Development (2009-2014).
She was the eldest and senior-most among female Members of Parliament in the 16th Lok Sabha. She is the second woman after Meira Kumar to be elected as the Speaker of the Lok Sabha. She was awarded India’s third highest civilian award the Padma Bhushan in 2021.
–Staff Reporter
