B Chandrakala, the 38-year-old IAS officer from Uttar Pradesh made headline news on Saturday when CBI teams raided her houses in Uttar Pradesh and Telangana as part of its probe into the politically-sensitive UP’s mining scam. It appeared to be an irony.
The 2008 batch IAS officer was best known for taking action against her subordinates, mostly due to the widely-circulated videos of the officer going out on surprise inspections and pulling up civic officials, sometimes over lack of quality in building material and at others, some lack of sanitation.
The raids were conducted as part of a probe into illegal sand mining cases in Uttar Pradesh. The CBI conducted searches on at least 12 locations in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Telangana. The CBI launched investigation into illegal sand mining following an Allahabad High Court order in July 2017.
Details of Saturday’s searches were not immediately known.
Chandrakala has been hugely popular on social media. She shot to fame in late 2014 when video of the woman IAS officer reprimanding erring civic official in UP’s Bulandshahr went viral on social media.
She also had her share of controversy when an 18-year-old was sent to jail for trying to click a selfie with the IAS officer in 2016.
Chandrakala, who belongs to Banjara tribe, hails from the fertiliser city of Ramagundam in Peddapalli district. It was earlier part of Karimnagar district in Telangana. Her father is a retired senior technician in the Fertiliser Corporation of India or the FCI in Ramagundam, while her husband A Ramulu works as a deputy executive engineer in Sriramsagar Project at Lower Manair Dam in Karimnagar town.
A graduate in Geography from Koti Women’s College under Osmania University in Hyderabad, Chandrakala did her post-graduation in Economics through distance education and cracked IAS in her first attempt in 2008.
She was allotted UP cadre. Chandrakala had worked in Allahabad, Hamirpur, Mathura, Bulandshahr and Meerut, before being picked up by the NDA government as the director of Swachh Bharat Mission under Union ministry of drinking water and sanitation. She was prematurely repatriated to her cadre, Uttar Pradesh, in February 2018.