The village of Diguva Magham sits in the dry, boulder-strewn uplands of Chittoor district, a landscape of tamarind trees, tank-fed fields and small temples in the far south of Andhra Pradesh. It is the kind of settlement that rarely appears on a national map, yet it is where Aruna Kumari Galla was born on 1 August 1944. From that beginning she travelled further than almost anyone in her generation of village-born Telugu women, moving from a district schoolroom to an American university, into the offices of a large automobile manufacturer in the United States, and finally into the cabinet of one of India's most populous states.

A Childhood in Chittoor

Aruna Kumari grew up in a household already touched by public service. Her father, Paturi Rajagopala Naidu, was a parliamentarian and a figure in the political and social life of the region, and the rhythms of campaigning, petitioning and constituency work would have been familiar to her long before she chose them for herself. Her early schooling was local rather than metropolitan; she completed her secondary schooling at the Zilla Parishad High School in Aragonda in 1959, a village institution of the sort that then educated the great majority of rural Andhra children. Aragonda and Diguva Magham lie in the same belt of Chittoor countryside, and the constituencies she would later represent were drawn across land she had known since girlhood.

It is worth pausing on how unusual her trajectory was. In the Andhra countryside of the 1950s, girls who finished secondary school were a small minority, and those who went on to higher study abroad were rarer still. That she did so, and that she then entered a technical profession, says a good deal about both her own determination and the value her family placed on education.

Computing in America

Aruna Kumari left India for the United States and completed a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1971, at a time when the discipline itself was young and when women in it were few. She then worked for the Chrysler Corporation, one of America's great automobile firms, first as a computer programmer and later as a departmental head responsible for management information systems on the sales side of the business. This was serious, hands-on technical and managerial work in an era of mainframe systems, punched media and the first large corporate databases.

Because of that stretch of her life, she is sometimes described simply as a computer professional. The description is accurate as far as it goes, but it understates her. Her lasting significance lies in what she did after returning to India, when she carried the discipline of a corporate management career into the far messier world of Indian electoral politics. Few Indian legislators of her generation arrived in the assembly with a technical degree and a decade of experience running information systems for a multinational.

Return, Marriage and the Move into Politics

She married Galla Ramachandra Naidu, the industrialist who founded the Amara Raja group of companies, an enterprise that grew from a small industrial venture near Tirupati into one of the country's leading manufacturers of storage batteries and a major employer in the Chittoor region. Their son, Jayadev Galla, would later take charge of the group's business and himself enter Parliament. The family thus became one of the most prominent in the district, combining industry and public life.

Aruna Kumari, however, built her political standing herself. She joined the Indian National Congress and worked her way through its organisational structures, serving as president of the Andhra Pradesh Mahila Congress, the party's women's wing in the state, and as a general secretary of the Pradesh Congress Committee. These were the training grounds of state politics, involving travel, dispute settlement, membership drives and the slow accumulation of a personal following.

Four Terms from Chandragiri

Her electoral base was the Chandragiri assembly constituency in Chittoor district, in the temple country around Tirupati. She first won the seat in 1989. In 1994, in a year that ran heavily against her party across the state, she lost to the Telugu Desam Party's Nara Ramamurthy Naidu. She returned to the assembly in 1999 and held the seat again in 2004 and in 2009, giving her four terms as a Member of the Legislative Assembly and an unbroken presence in Chandragiri's representation from 1999 until the reorganisation of the state.

Her ministerial career spanned a decade. From May 2004 to May 2009 she held the portfolio of Medical Education and Health Insurance, a demanding brief in a state that was then expanding both its medical colleges and its publicly funded health cover for poor families. From May 2009 to November 2010 she was Minister for Roads and Buildings, responsible for the state's public works and its road network. From November 2010 to February 2014 she served as Minister for Mines and Geology, a portfolio of considerable economic weight in a state rich in mineral deposits and one that demanded firm administrative handling. She was among the small number of women to hold successive cabinet ranks in undivided Andhra Pradesh.

After Bifurcation

The division of Andhra Pradesh in 2014 reshaped the political landscape she had worked in for a quarter of a century. She left the Congress and joined the Telugu Desam Party, continuing to be associated with public life in the residual state of Andhra Pradesh.

Seen whole, her career traces an arc that few have matched: a girl schooled in a village high school in Chittoor, a computer scientist in an American corporation, an organiser in a mass political party, a four-time legislator and a cabinet minister three times over. For Diguva Magham, and for the wider stretch of rural Chittoor from which she came, she remains an example of how far a village education, pursued stubbornly, can reach.