The Journey · Public Service
Public service, from the ground up
Public careers in India are usually described from the top down. This one is better read from the bottom up — because it actually started at the bottom, in a municipal ward in a small town in Mayurbhanj, in 1997.
1997 · Rairangpur
A ward, a council, a beginning
In 1997 Droupadi Murmu contested and won a seat on the Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat, the municipal council of the sub‑divisional town nearest her village. The seat was one of those reserved for women. She stood as an independent candidate, and afterwards joined the Bharatiya Janata Party. She went on to serve as vice‑chairperson of the council.
A Nagar Panchayat is the smallest category of urban local body recognised in Indian law — the tier for a settlement in transition from rural to urban. Its councillors deal with water supply, street lighting, drainage, sanitation, local roads, markets, public health and the municipal budget. There is no ceremony in the work and very little discretion in it. What there is, is proximity: a ward councillor is the tier of Indian government that citizens can physically find.
Constitutional context
What the 73rd and 74th Amendments were for
Before 1992, local government in India existed at the pleasure of state legislatures. State governments created panchayats and municipalities, and could suspend or supersede them. Elections were held irregularly or not at all.
The Seventy‑Third and Seventy‑Fourth Constitutional Amendment Acts, 1992, changed that. They inserted Parts IX and IX‑A into the Constitution, gave rural and urban local bodies constitutional status, required elections every five years conducted by an independent State Election Commission, and reserved not less than a third of all seats — and of chairperson positions — for women, with proportionate reservation for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
The argument made at the time, in Parliament and outside it, was that reservation at the base of the system would over a generation change who was available for office higher up. Droupadi Murmu’s career is among the clearest demonstrations of that argument that the Indian system has produced: ward councillor in 1997, member of the state legislature in 2000, minister the same year, Governor in 2015, Head of State in 2022.
A ladder of elected and constitutional office
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Municipal council · 1997
Councillor and vice-chairperson, Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat.
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State legislature · 2000 and 2004
Member, Odisha Legislative Assembly, from Rairangpur.
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State executive · 2000–2004
Minister of State with independent charge, two portfolios.
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Constitutional office · 2015
Governor of Jharkhand, appointed by the President under Article 155.
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Head of State · 2022
President of India, elected under Articles 54 and 55.
Before and beside politics
Community work and the teaching years
Her public life did not begin with an election. It began with three years of unpaid teaching at the Sri Aurobindo Integral Education and Research Centre in Rairangpur, between 1994 and 1997, and with the ordinary standing that follows from having taught a town’s children.
That pattern — work first, office afterwards — recurs. She had already spent four years as a junior assistant in the Irrigation and Power Department of the Government of Odisha, from 1979 to 1983, before either the classroom or the council.
Within her party she carried organisational responsibility over a long period, including in its Scheduled Tribes wing, and served as a district president. These are unglamorous positions. They are also the ones in which a public representative learns the geography of a district in detail.
Public service as President
Rashtrapati Bhavan as a public building
The office of President carries no departmental portfolio. What it carries instead is access — and a considerable capacity to direct national attention.
During President Murmu’s tenure Rashtrapati Bhavan has received large numbers of citizens in organised groups: teachers on Teachers’ Day, students, members of Self‑Help Groups, sportspersons, Padma awardees and delegations from across the country. In January 2023 the estate’s gardens were renamed Amrit Udyan and their public opening was made a fixture of the annual calendar. In July 2024 the Durbar Hall and the Ashok Hall — the two principal ceremonial rooms — were renamed Ganatantra Mandap and Ashok Mandap, the President’s Secretariat explaining that ‘Durbar’ referred to the courts of rulers and had lost its relevance once India became a republic, a ganatantra.
In September 2022 she launched the Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, the national campaign against tuberculosis, and has continued to associate the office with it.
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