Ritu Khanduri to be the first woman speaker of the state
Saturday, 26 March 2022 | PNS | Dehradun
Ritu Khanduri of BJP would be formally elected as the speaker of the fifth elected Vidhan Sabha of Uttarakhand on Saturday. The Kotdwar MLA is the only candidate in contention for the position of speaker. The election of the speaker would be held in a special session on Saturday. The Vidhan Sabha secretariat has received 16 different sets of nominations for Khanduri. The nomination has been separately proposed by MLAs Prem Chand Agarwal, Bharat Chaudhary, Kailash Gehtodi, Satpal Maharaj, Umesh Sharma Kau, Khajan Das, Munna Singh Chauhan, Sarita Arya, Durgesh Lal, Chandan Ram Das, Pramod Nainwal, Savita Kapur, Mahesh Jeena, Bishen Singh Chufal, Madan Kaushik and Vinod Kandari and seconded by an equal number of MLAs.
Khanduri is the daughter of former CM Major General (retd) BC Khanduri and is a second time MLA. In the year 2017 she was elected for the first time from Yamkeshwar assembly constituency. This time she was shifted to neighbouring Kotdwar seat after Harak Singh Rawat defected to the Congress party. In the election she defeated Surendra Singh Negi of Congress. Khanduri would be the sixth speaker of Uttarakhand. In the first assembly carved out of Uttar Pradesh (UP), Prakash Pant was made the speaker. In the first elected assembly in the year 2002, Yashpal Arya of Congress donned the chair of speaker. Senior leader of BJP Harbans Kapoor was the speaker during the term of the third elected assembly while Govind Singh Kunjwal was speaker in the fourth elected assembly. In the fifth elected assembly Prem Chand Agarwal donned the chair of speaker from the year 2017 to 2022.
