Presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu and Rairangpur connect | IN PICS
India Today
Droupadi Murmu, NDA's presidential candidate hails from a village in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj.
NDA's presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu's town Rairangpur is 280km away from Odisha's Bhuwaneshwar and 267 km away from Kolkata, where she stayed with her daughter Itishree Murmu and her Tarinisen, her brother. Her yellow two-storeyed house is next to a shack with a tiled roof.
Some 20 kms away from Rairangpur is Droupadi Murmu's native village, Uperbeda. Dulali Tudu, wife of Dularam Tudu, Murmu's nephew, stays in her native village home with their two children.
It was in Uperbeda where Murmu studied till class 5 in primary school and left for Bhuwaneshwar for further education.
After her graduation, she joined the Odisha government in a clerical post at the secretariat in Bhubaneswar. By this time, she had married Shyam Charan Murmu, who worked at a State Bank of India branch at Rairangpur.
The former Jharkhand governor then came to Rairangpur in the early 90's. In 1994, Droupadi Murmu taught voluntarily, refusing a full salary, at Shri Aurobindo Institute at Rairangpur till 1997.
In 1997, Droupadi Murmu won her first poll, becoming a councillor. Murmu was an independent candidate for the Ward No 2 seat in Rairangpur's Notified Area Council, which was a reserved seat for ST women.
She won in 1997 and later joined the BJP and became Vice Chairman of the council. She was also the vice president of the Scheduled Tribes Morcha of the BJP.
