Saifai, a village in the Etawah district of Uttar Pradesh, is the birthplace of Akhilesh Yadav, who was born there on 1 July 1973 and who has carried the name of that place with him through every stage of a long public career. For most of the twentieth century Saifai was an unremarkable settlement in the dry, canal-fed country between the Yamuna and the Chambal, known to little beyond its own tehsil and market town. The fortunes of one family living there changed that completely. Today the village is recognised far outside Uttar Pradesh, and its name appears in the biography of a man who went on to lead the country's most populous state.

Early years and education

He was born into the household of Mulayam Singh Yadav, a teacher and wrestler from Saifai who founded the Samajwadi Party, served as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and held the defence portfolio in the union government. Politics was therefore part of the household air, but the son's education took him a long way from the fields around the village. He was sent to the Dholpur Military School in Rajasthan, a boarding institution with a disciplined, uniformed routine very different from village life. From there he moved south to Karnataka, taking a bachelor's degree in civil environmental engineering at the Jawaharlal Nehru National College of Engineering in Mysore. He then travelled abroad, completing a master's degree in environmental engineering at the University of Sydney in Australia.

This training was unusual for an Indian politician of his generation, most of whom came to office through law, agriculture, student unions or the trade of politics itself. An engineering education gave him a working vocabulary of roads, drainage, water systems and urban planning, and that vocabulary would later be visible in the kind of projects his government chose to pursue. It also meant that when he returned to Uttar Pradesh, he arrived as someone who had lived and studied in three very different parts of the world before entering the constituency politics of the Ganga plain.

Entry into national politics

His formal political career began in 2000, when he won a by-election to the Lok Sabha from Kannauj, an ancient city on the Ganga long associated with perfume-making and with a deep layer of medieval history. He was in his late twenties. Kannauj became his political home in national politics, and he was returned from the seat in successive general elections, building a familiarity with the constituency's towns and villages that lasted for decades.

Through the 2000s he worked within the Samajwadi Party organisation founded by his father, a party rooted in the socialist tradition associated with Ram Manohar Lohia and drawing much of its support from among Other Backward Classes, particularly Yadav communities, and from Muslim voters in the state. In the run-up to the 2012 assembly election he undertook an extensive campaign across Uttar Pradesh, travelling widely through its districts and addressing a large number of public meetings. The election returned the Samajwadi Party with a clear majority in the state assembly.

Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh

On 15 March 2012 he was sworn in as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh at the age of thirty-eight, the youngest person to have held that office up to that time. During the term he sat as a member of the state legislative council. He remained in office until 19 March 2017, completing a full five-year term.

The best-known undertakings of those years were large physical projects. The Agra–Lucknow Expressway, a long access-controlled highway linking the state capital with the western part of Uttar Pradesh, was built during his tenure and substantially reduced travel times across the corridor. The first phase of the Lucknow Metro, the capital's urban rail system, was also developed in this period. Alongside these came a widely publicised welfare measure: a scheme distributing laptop computers to students, intended to widen access to digital learning among young people in a state where such devices were then uncommon in ordinary households. Together the projects reflected a preference for visible infrastructure paired with direct benefits to students and young voters.

Party leadership and later years

In 2017 he became national president of the Samajwadi Party, a position he has held since. He returned to electoral office in the state in 2022, winning the Karhal assembly constituency in Mainpuri district and sitting as a member of the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly. In June 2024 he was elected once more to the Lok Sabha from Kannauj, resuming his place in the national parliament. His wife, Dimple Yadav, is herself a member of parliament, and the couple's political careers have run in parallel for many years.

Saifai and its transformation

The village at the centre of this story is no longer a modest cluster of houses in Etawah district. Saifai now holds a state medical university, developed from an earlier rural institute of medical sciences and research, which brings teaching, hospital services and specialist care to a rural part of western Uttar Pradesh that previously had to look towards Kanpur or Lucknow. It also has a substantial sports complex with a hockey pitch, a swimming pool, indoor facilities and a national training centre, together with a sports college that draws young athletes from across the region.

For a heritage record of India's villages, Saifai is a striking case of how a single place can be reshaped by the public life of the people born in it. Roads, institutions and an airstrip arrived in a village that had none of them within living memory. Whatever view one takes of the politics involved, the connection between the man and the ground he came from is unusually direct: he continues to describe himself in terms of Saifai, and the village continues to be described in terms of him.