Uttarakhand will get its first women chief secretary on Wednesday as the Dhami government on Tuesday promoted Radha Raturi, a senior IAS officer from the 1988 batch, as the successor to the incumbent Chief Secretary, SS Sandhu.
Senior officials in the Chief Minister’s Office said that Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has approved Radha Raturi’s appointment as the next chief secretary of Uttarakhand. She will be the 18th chief secretary and the first woman to hold this position since the creation of Uttarakhand in 2000. Radha Raturi will assume charge on January 31 as her predecessor is set to complete his post-retirement six-month extension on the same day.
Raturi, currently serving as the additional chief secretary to the Chief Minister, was slated to succeed Sandhu six months ago. However, the Centre granted a six-month extension to Sandhu on the recommendation of the Chief Minister, and this led to a delay in her succession. Although the extension to Sandhu did not go down well with Raturi, she was pacified by the Dhami government by practically authorising her to have a significant role in all developmental activities, schemes and programmes of the Centre. Notably, Raturi played a key role in the success of the Global Investors Summit organised by the Dhami government in December 2023.
Raturi will serve as the top bureaucrat of the state till March-end as she is scueduled to retire in the next two months. Sources in the state government, however, said that the Chief Minister might recommend a six-month extension to Raturi as well. In that case, the next senior officer Anand Bardhan, in line to succeed her, is bound to get his promotion delayed. He, however, will have more years to serve as the chief secretary of Uttarakhand with age being on his side. Raturi, a Uttarakhand cadre officer, is a native of Madhya Pradesh.