Annapurna Devi as Union Women & Child Development Minister: Decoding the political significance in 5 points

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament from Jharkhand, succeeds Smriti Irani as the new Minister of Women and Child Development in the Prime Minister Narendra government’s third term government. Irani was dropped from the new cabinet after she lost her Amethi seat in to Congress leader Kishori Lal Sharma.

Fifty-five-year-old Devi is one of the two women Cabinet ministers in the PM Modi-led (NDA) at the Centre. The other woman minister in the 30-member cabinet is Finance Minister .

Elected from the Koderma Lok Sabha seat in Jharkhand for the second straight term, Devi has served as the Union Minister of State for Education in previous Modi government after 2021. Devi and Ranchi MP Sanjay Seth are two ministers in the PM cabinet from the tribal-dominated Jharkhand.

Devi was with the (RJD) until she quit the party months before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and switched to the BJP. In the 2024 general election, she won by the biggest margin in Jharkhand. Devi defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) candidate Vinod Singh with a margin of 3,77,014 votes.

This is Devi’s second term as MP. In 2019 she defeated former CM by 4.55 lakh votes as a BJP candidate.

Devi jumped into politics after the death of her husband, Ramesh Yadav, a RJD legislator, in 1998. Devi contested in the by-polls and won to became a member of the then united .  She has served as Minister of State for Mines and Geology in the RJD government of undivided Bihar. In 2000, southern Bihar was ceded to form the new state of Jharkhand.

Devi served as MLA in Jharkhand assembly for two terms between 2005 and 2014. She served the Minister of Irrigation, Women and Child Welfare, and Registration in in 2012. 

Before she joined the BJP, Devi was the