Jaya Varma Sinha First Woman to Head Railway Board: Know All About IRTS Officer in Top Ministry Post

Jaya Varma Sinha will be the first woman to hold the position of chairperson and chief executive officer of the Railway Board from Friday (September 1). She joined the Indian Railway Traffic Service in 1988 and is all set to replace Anil Kumar Lahoti.

Sinha will become the 46th chairperson of the Railway Board, and all 45 of those who held the position since 1951 were men. In an order issued on Thursday, the appointments committee of the cabinet approved her charge for one year from September 1 to August 31, 2024.

She came into the limelight on coming out with the sequence of the Odisha triple train crash at Balasore in June, which claimed 291 lives.

When Sinha was the railway adviser in the High Commission of India at Dhaka in Bangladesh for four years, it was under her tenure that the Maitree Express from Kolkata to Dhaka was inaugurated. An Allahabad University graduate, she was the member operations and business development in the Railway Board. In around 35 years of service, she has worked with different railway zones.

She has served as the principal chief commercial manager as well as the senior deputy general manager and chief vigilance officer of South Eastern Railway. She was also the divisional railway manager of Sealdah in the Eastern Railway, and has also worked in Northern Railway.

The outgoing chairperson, Lahoti, took charge on January 1.

Entry of women into the Railway Board

While Sinha is making history by holding the topmost position in the railway ministry, it was Vijayalakshmi Viswanathan who was the first woman member of the Railway Board. She was appointed as the additional member (finance) in 2002 and was also the first woman divisional railway manager when she took charge in the Mysore division from 1995-1997. The other feather in her cap was to become the first woman additional general manager, first female officer-on-special duty and first woman additional member of the board.