The 72-member council of ministers in the third Narendra Modi government has seven women, including two with cabinet rank. This is four less than the outgoing council of ministers.
Nirmala Sitharaman and Annpurna Devi were sworn in as cabinet ministers in the grand ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan last evening.
While Ms Sitharaman, a Rajya Sabha MP, has earlier held big ticket portfolios such as finance and defence, two-time Koderma MP Annpurna Devi has been promoted from the minister of state rank to a cabinet minister position. She was the junior minister for education in the outgoing government.
The other women sworn in as ministers yesterday are Anupriya Patel, Raksha Khadse, Savitri Thakur, Shobha Karandlaje and Nimuben Bambhaniya.
Anupriya Patel is the chief of Apna Dal (Sonelal), an ally of the BJP. She was minister of state for health and family welfare in the first Narendra Modi government, and was named the junior minister for commerce and industry in Modi 2.0. Her party’s Lok Sabha seat tally dropped from two to one in this election.
Thirty-seven-year-old Raksha Khadse is the daughter-in-law of veteran Maharashtra politician Eknath Khadse. A three-time MP from Raver, Ms Khadse has earlier worked as a sarpanch and a member of the Zila Parishad.
Another first-time minister to make it to Modi 3.0 is Savitri Thakur, a two-time MP from Dhar. She won the 2014 election, but did not get a poll pass in the 2019 polls. In 2024, she came back strongly to win the seat by a margin of over 2 lakh votes. Ms Thakur, too, has extensive experience of working at the panchayat level.
Shobha Karandlaje, a two-time BJP MP from Karnataka who has earlier served as a state minister, is among the ministers in the second Narendra Modi government who have been retained in Modi 3.0. She has earlier held portfolios of food processing industries and agriculture and farmers’ welfare in the Union government.
Fifty-seven-year-old Nimuben Bhambaniya is MP from Bhavnagar. A former teacher, she has earlier served as Bhavnagar mayor and worked in different organisational roles within the BJP.
