Ritu Jaiswal Age, Caste, Husband, Family, Biography & More

Some Lesser Known Facts About Ritu Jaiswal

• Ritu Jaiswal is an Indian politician who became the State President of RJD (Women Wing) in 2023. She was appointed as the State Spokesperson of RJD in 2021. She was appointed as State President of RJD (Women Wing) in 2023. Previously, she was the Mukhiya of Gram Panchayat Singhwahini, Sitamarhi, Bihar (2016–2021).

• She was renowned for her leadership traits and rebellious attitude during her college days. She empathised with the poor to such an extent that she would distribute her mother’s saris among them without informing anyone.

• In 1996, she got married to an IAS officer, Arun Kumar. He has served as the commissioner at the Chief Vigilance Commission (CVC) and as an official of the Indian Ordnance Factories Service. In 2021, following his wife’s footsteps, Arun became the Mukhiya of Gram Panchayat Singhwahini.

• After her marriage, she started living a luxurious life with her husband and children in Khel Gaon, a posh locality in Delhi.

• A turning point came in her life in 2013 when she visited her ancestral matrimonial home in Narkatiya Village, Sonbarsa Block, Sitamarhi District of Bihar. There, she witnessed the plight of rural India as the village lacked basic amenities like electricity and clean drinking water. In an interview, she recalled the time she visited Narkatiya for the first time and said,
  

  When I had to walk down the river to reach the village with chappals in my hand, human excreta clogging my feet, I could only remember Prem Chand’s stories. My heart sank when I saw people of these villages living in extreme poverty, children and pregnant women malnourished. There was no youth in these villages, it only had old men and women, pregnant women, children and widows.”

• Consequently, she made up her mind to bring a progressive change in the village. She started by ensuring the provision of better education to girls. A girl from the village, who had a B. Ed. degree, used to work as a schoolteacher in Bokaro, Jharkhand. Ritu approached her with an offer to work as a tutor for girls in the Sitamarhi in exchange for better pay. Together, they started a batch of 25 girls out of which 12 passed Class 10 with flying colours. Ritu frequently started visiting the village. Sometimes, she would bring a projector and educate villagers on topics like the health impacts of open defecation, pesticide-free farming, and domestic violence.

• Soon, she discovered that an electrification scheme was already sanctioned for the village, but it wasn’t executed. Therefore, she mobilised villagers and took them to the electricity office to get the work done. She successfully brought bulbs and fans to 80-odd households by 2015. Looking at the developments that she had brought to the village, she had a feeling of self-actualization and decided to return to her city life in May 2016.  However, the villagers persuaded her to stay and elected her as the Mukhiya of Gram Panchayat Singhwahini, Sitamarhi, Bihar in 2016.

• She won the elections with 72% votes of the 6500-strong electorate. As the Mukhiya of Gram Panchayat Singhwahini, she was the incharge of the seven villages — Narkatia, Khutha, Kaharwa, Badi Singhwahini, Choti Singhwahini, Bhagwanpur, and Jankinagar — that made up Singhwahini Panchayat. Therefore, she shunned the luxurious life she had with her bureaucrat husband and two kids in Delhi’s Khel gaon and shifted to Singhwahini.

• The first challenge that she took up was the eradication of open defecation in Singhwahini. She saw to the construction of 2000 toilets in the villages with the help of DM Rajeev Roshan meanwhile educating the villagers on the health and social impacts of open defecation. Her efforts led to the declaration of panchayat as ODF (open defecation free) in October 2016.
  

  Ritu Jaiswal spreading awareness about using toilets to end open defecation

• Next, she addressed the problem of the Public Distribution System (PDS) for which she collected the PDS card of 14,000 villagers from the panchayat and tabulated the details. Her inquiries revealed that out of the five dealers in the village, two were allotted more ration than the other three. She presented the problem to the DM after which the Block Development Officer (BDO) was tasked with rearranging the ration allotment.

• When she noticed that teachers of the panchayat’s nine schools were reporting late at work, she opted for “Gandhigiri” and instructed the parents and guardians of children to greet teachers with folded hands and say,
  

  Kya sir, ham apka doh ghante se intezar kar rahein hain.”
  (Sir, we have been waiting for you since two hours.)

  Embarrassed, the teachers soon mended their ways.

• During her tenure as Mukhiya, she brought various other developments to the panchayat including the installation of hand pumps for clean drinking water, the construction of pucca roads (i.e metalled roads), and collaboration of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research team with the panchayat’s farmers for yielding better crops.
  

  Ritu Jaiswal posing with a hand pump in Singhwahini which she successfully installed to ensure clean drinking water in the village

• In 2020, she joined the Janata Dal (United) party to contest the Bihar Legislative Assembly elections; however, she left the party after realising that she would be allotted a ticket from a different constituency than the Parihar Assembly constituency in Sitamarhi district. Ritu had spent the last four years serving as the Mukhiya from Gram Panchayat Raj Singwahini and believed that the Parihar seat was her stronghold. Thereafter, she decided to contest the elections as an independent candidate, but the Rashtriya Janata Dal offered her a ticket to contest the Parihar seat. Ritu lost the election to BJP candidate Gayatri Yadav.
  

  Ritu Jaiswal with the President of the Rashtriya Janata Dal Lalu Prasad Yadav

• She was a speaker at the international conference on LPG: Catalyst of Social Change-2 in Ranchi (2018), SEE Talks at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai (2018), TED (conference) on the topic “Why unregistered rapes in rural India not considered as crime” in Patna (2018), Youth Ki Awaaz Summit – 2019, and “Democracy Express” in Delhi (2019).

• She was also one of the five Mukhiyas who were selected to represent Bihar in the Capacity Building Program for Sarpanch & Panchayat Secretaries by The Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India at the Siri Fort Auditorium, New Delhi on 16 June 2018.

• She has a pet dog, Jerry.
  

  Ritu Jaiswal with her pet dog, Jerry