Lt Gen Punita Arora – First Woman Achive Second Highest Rank

Punita Arora- First Woman In India To Achieve Second Highest Rank

Hello aspirants,

In this post, we will know about lady warriors who broke the glass ceiling and shattered the common misbelief of gender in the armed forces. This post will motivate all the aspirants including the female aspirants.

So, let’s begin

• Punita Arora is the first woman in India to reach the second highest rank, i.e. Lieutenant General of Indian Armed Forces and the first female Vice-admiral of Indian Navy. She is the only female officer to achieve this deed for both the armed forces of the country.
• She was born on May 31, 1946, into a Punjabi family which hails from Lahore. When she was one year old, her family moved to India during partition and got settled in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
• Talking about the educational background of Lt Gen Arora, She studied in Sophia School in Saharanpur till 8th grade. After that, she moved to Guru Nanak Girls Inter-College.
• In 11th Standard while getting admitted to Government school for boys she decided to take science as a career, this helped her pursue medical after completing schooling.
• She joined Armed Forces Medical College, Pune in 1963 which was the second batch of the AFMC; she was a very bright student which can be concluded from her performance in the AFMC where she stood first in her batch.
• Let’s see about the career- Lt Gen Punita was commissioned in January 1968. Before becoming Vice Admiral of the Indian Navy, she was Commandant of AFMC.
• She took charge of the commandant of Armed Forces Medical College in 2004 after that becoming the first woman officer to command the medical college.
• Before that She was coordinating Medical Research of the armed forces at the Army headquarters as additional director-general of Armed Forces Medical Services (Medical Research).
• She moved from the Army to the Navy as the AFMS has a shared pool which allows officers to migrate from one service to another depending on the requirement.
• She has gained a large amount of respect and honour over her 36 years of service i.e.
• the Vishisht Seva Medal for providing efficient and timely help to victims of the Kaluchak massacre.
• Sena Medal for providing gynae-endoscopy and oncology facilities and pioneering invitro-fertilisation and assisted reproductive techniques for infertile and childless couples in military hospitals.
• Vishisht Seva Medal was awarded to her in the year 2002.
• 30 Years Long Service Medal, 20 Years Long Service Medal, 9 Years Long Service Medal are also some of the honours bestowed to her.

I hope this post motivated all the aspirants.

Stay tuned to DDE for more such post.

Jai Hind