Meet Dimple Yadav: Driving force behind implementing women and children welfare schemes in UP

For most of the last three years, she has been the dutiful Yadav bahu, wife to Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav, concerning herself mostly with family matters along with tending to Kannauj as its Lok Sabha MP.

But over the last few months, there’s been a shift. Dimple Yadav, 37 and the mother of three children, has increasingly been working behind the scenes to make sure that welfare schemes, especially those related to women and children, are implemented effectively and even giving shape to some new state initiatives.


The bureaucracy is full of praise, perhaps predictably, but Yadav seems to have earned the respect of administrators due to her commitment. "She has been the driving force in conceiving and setting up the Rani Laxmi Bai Mahila Samman Kosh and the Asha Jyoti Kendra’s for women’s welfare," said principal secretary for women and child welfare, Renuka Kumar.

"We had our first meeting in September 2014 and since then Dimple Yadav-ji has been a source of inspiration for rolling out these schemes. Needless to say her presence has expedited things and we have been able to achieve things in a very short period."

Last weekend, she and her husband presided over a function to provide cash awards to women who have been victims of acid attacks and felicitate women gram pradhans. A Rani Laxmi Bai Mahila Samman Kosh with a corpus of Rs 100 crore was also launched on the occasion to help women in distress and improve their lives.

"All these have been Dimple Yadav’s ideas and she has been following up on the progress of these schemes closely," chief secretary Alok Ranjan told ET. "She has also been active in shaping the State Nutrition Mission, which works to reduce malnutrition among children and pregnant mothers." Yadav has also sought to ensure that glitches are ironed out and that programme rollout is smooth.

"She does not interfere in government work beyond a point, but has been instrumental in giving inputs in specific areas and following up on the progress of some schemes close to her heart," Ranjan said. The CM’s wife is the first woman from the Yadav family to step into a public role, initially as a lawmaker and then as someone who keeps tabs on the government’s work and provides inputs to the CM, besides engaging with social welfare plans.

Her political debut in 2009 wasn’t too auspicious—losing to Raj Babbar of the Congress in the Ferozabad Lok Sabha seat. The event was a watershed, hardening her husband’s resolve to turn the Samajwadi Party around, leading, among other things, to Amar Singh’s ouster and later to victory in the assembly elections of 2012. She was then fielded from her husband’s seat of Kannauj and won unopposed as all the other candidates withdrew. She was re-elected from the constituency in the 2014 poll.

When thrust into the limelight as the chief minister’s wife, she kept a low profile early on, attending few functions. After becoming an MP, she started appearing at some official and party engagements.

This has increased over the past few months as she’s taken a greater interest in welfare programmes, such as the launch of the State Nutrition Mission in November last year in association with the Citizens’ Alliance Against Malnutrition. At the launch, she spoke passionately about the need to remedy a situation in which 42 of every 1,000 children under the age of one were succumbing to malnutrition. She didn’t respond to queries from ET. Yadav has led from the front on the initiative, said Juhie Singh, chairperson of the Commission for Protection of Child Rights.

"She got us to prepare a list of malnourished children in each village. An exhaustive list was prepared and officials were asked to address it on priority," Singh said. "In fact, she came up with the idea of senior officials in the district adopting two villages each from this list, so that accountability could be fixed. She also intervened to ensure that the district magistrate adopted the worst two villages from the list so that there could be instant transformation in these children’s lives."

Singh, daughter of former chief secretary Akhand Pratap Singh, said, "She has always been receptive to ideas and keeps a dignified presence. She is exactly what we need in politics to highlight women-specific issues." Yadav comes from a military family and was educated all over India--Pune, Bathinda, the Andaman and Nicobar islands--as her father moved from one posting to another.

A graduate in commerce from Lucknow University, Dimple Yadav’s increasing role in the party and government owes a lot to her husband’s encouragement, observers said. Having sought to focus closely on women and child welfare, she has avoided ruffling any feathers in the state or within the family.