Niranam is an old village near Thiruvalla in what is now the Pathanamthitta district of Kerala, a settlement with a long Syrian Christian history and a reputation for producing scholars. Anna Rajam George was born there on 17 July 1927, in the princely state of Travancore, and in 1951 she walked into a service that had been created by the British for men and had never admitted an Indian woman. She stayed in it for thirty-one years and left it having built India's first computerised port.

Kozhikode, Madras and an Examination

She was educated in Malabar rather than in her home district, taking her intermediate at Providence Women's College in Kozhikode and her bachelor's degree at Malabar Christian College in the same city. She then went to the University of Madras, where she completed a master's degree in English literature in 1949.

In 1950 she sat the civil services examination and passed. She was the first woman in independent India to do so and to be appointed to the Indian Administrative Service, joining the 1951 batch and opting for the Madras cadre. Getting through the written papers turned out to be the easy part. At the interview she was actively discouraged from the service and pressed to consider the foreign service or the central secretariat instead, on the grounds that district administration was no place for a woman. She declined to be redirected.

The obstruction continued after selection. The appointment terms that women were then offered carried a condition requiring resignation on marriage, a clause that had no equivalent for male officers. Anna Rajam objected to it. The condition was subsequently removed, and its removal opened the service properly to every woman who followed her.

District Work and a Chief Minister Who Disapproved

Her training was not made lighter for her. She learned horse riding and rifle and revolver shooting alongside her batchmates, and took the same instruction in magisterial powers. Her first posting was as sub-collector in the Madras state, and she became the first woman in India to hold charge of a sub-division, at Tirupattur.

The Chief Minister of Madras at the time was C. Rajagopalachari, who told her plainly that he did not think a woman should be given executive field responsibility. He was persuaded otherwise by her actual performance in the districts, and later publicly acknowledged that he had been wrong. Field administration in the early 1950s meant famine and flood relief, land revenue, law and order, and touring the interior alone, and she did all of it in a context where every villager, every clerk and every police officer she dealt with had never seen a woman in the job.

Delhi and the Nhava Sheva Port

She rose through a long sequence of senior posts. In the Madras government she served as Under Secretary for Agriculture, Deputy Secretary in the Public department and later Secretary for Agriculture. Moving to the central government, she held charge as Deputy Secretary in Revenue, Additional Secretary in Agriculture, and chairperson of the National Seeds Corporation. She was appointed Secretary in the Ministry of Education and Culture, becoming the first woman to hold the rank of Secretary to the Government of India. She was also closely involved in the administrative machinery for the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi, working with Rajiv Gandhi on the project, and had earlier worked under Indira Gandhi.

Her most tangible legacy is on the Maharashtra coast. As chairperson of the Nhava Sheva Port Trust she was responsible for driving through the construction of what became Jawaharlal Nehru Port, India's first computerised port. The site was marshland and salt pans; the project required land acquisition, engineering on unfamiliar ground, and the introduction of container-handling technology that Indian ports had not previously used. She was in her late fifties when she took it on. The port went on to become the country's largest container facility. For this work she was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1989.

A Deliberately Quiet Retirement

She married R. N. Malhotra, a batchmate from the same 1951 IAS intake, and the two of them settled in Mumbai after retirement. She retired from the service in 1982 and afterwards declined most of the public attention that came her way, giving few interviews and consistently refusing to present herself as a symbol. When she did speak about being the first, her emphasis was usually on the clause about marriage and on the value of simply doing the work well enough that the argument became unarguable.

Anna Rajam Malhotra died on 17 September 2018, aged ninety-one. By then, women were serving as district collectors, police chiefs and cabinet secretaries across India, and the interview board's objection of 1950 had become almost impossible to explain to anyone under forty. That is the most accurate measure of what she did.