New Secretary appointed

Feature

Keywords: Secretary of the Auroville Foundation, Auroville Foundation, Government of Gujarat, Chennai, Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Movement), Indian Administrative Service (IAS), COVID-19 pandemic, Ayurveda and Gujarat

References: Dr Jayanti Ravi, Kireet Joshi and Smt Sonia Gandhi

On June 2, 2021, the Working Committee informed the community that Gujarat-cadre IAS officer Dr. Jayanti S. Ravi, who has been serving as Principal Secretary in the Gujarat Health and Family and Welfare Department, has been appointed as Secretary of the Auroville Foundation on deputation. Dr. Ravi, a 1991-batch IAS officer, will be Secretary of the Auroville Foundation “for three years with effect from the date of assumption of charge of the post”, states the transfer order. Dr. Ravi will succeed Mr. M.V. Chunkath IAS (ret’d), who demitted the office of Secretary, Auroville Foundation on June 13th 2019. It is unknown when Dr. Ravi will take up her post in Auroville.

Dr. Ravi has visited Auroville on several occasions in a personal capacity and had worked with Dr. Kireet Joshi, who mentored her in studying the works and philosophies of Sri Aurobindo. She is a native of Chennai, is married to Shri Ravi Gopalan and has two children. She holds a Master’s degree in nuclear physics from the University of Madras, a Master degree in Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University and a PhD in e-governance from MS University, Baroda.

Dr. Ravi’s achievements as an IAS officer are impressive. As a 25-year old working in the district of Jamnagar in Gujarat, she managed to rescue over 500 bonded labourers from the ships anchored in the high seas off Jamnagar coast. As District Collector of the Panchmahals district in Gujarat, she was able to secure lasting peace in the city of Godhra after the 2002 incident, when 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya died inside a train compartment, which caught fire. Her effective handling of communal tensions won her accolades from the media. During her tenure at Panchmahals, she also started an e-governance experiment to make government information and forms readily available to the public.

In August 2004, she was handpicked by Congress President and UPA chairperson, Smt. Sonia Gandhi, and was deputed as Director of the National Advisory Council which was headed by Ms. Gandhi. She was deputed at the UPA-led NAC till July 2007.

She then served again the state of Gujarat in various functions, such as Labour Commissioner and Director, Labour & Employment. She has worked as Commissioner, Higher Education and as Commissioner, Technical Education in Gujarat. She has worked with Prof Kireet Joshi, the advisor to the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to establish the Children’s University, the Indian Institute of Teacher Education (IITE) and the Gujarat Educational Innovations Commission.

In this period she also wrote the book Silver Lining: Insights into Gujarat, which carries a foreword by Sam Pitroda, Chairman of the National Innovation Council. The book is a collection of some of the experiences and instances that Dr. Ravi found herself in at various points in her career. Originally written as columns in the magazine Frontline, the vignettes show the career life of a bureaucrat credited with turning around a dormant system of higher education in Gujarat. It shows another side of administration, the human face of development, portraying, among others, educated youths returning to their villages to usher in a transformation of life; children whose demands for books to read force a sleepy public library to order three thousand books; illiterate women ensuring that the village school is functional and well kept; and persons afflicted with leprosy who struggle for the right to a dignified life. All these diverse stories give an account of the manner in which government intervention could catalyse the lives of common people.

Dr. Ravi subsequently became the Principal Secretary and Commissioner, Rural Development, in which time she championed the Swachch Bharat Mission for Rural Sanitation in the State. During this period she authored the book Sanity in Sanitation, published in 2019, which talks about the journey of an IAS officer who strove to fulfill the dream of an Open Defecation Free Gujarat. The true meaning of Swachh Bharat was seen as village after village transformed into a cleaner hub as citizens took up the responsibility to keep their village open-defecation free. The book’s cover shows a mother leading her toddler to squat on the toilet, a ‘luxury’ which at the time was a far-off dream.

Dr. Ravi was posted as the Principal Secretary and Commissioner, Health and Family Welfare, in Gujarat’s administration in June 2017 and was spearheading the COVID-19 control activities in the state.

She focused on the 7/11 approach based on a total of 11 indicators, seven of which were related to mother & child health such as MMR (Maternal Mortality Rate), IMR (Infant Mortality Rate), Sex Ratio at Birth, Low Birth Weight babies, Spacing between births, Immunisation, Anemia as well as four other indicators related to Communicable diseases, Non-Communicable diseases, Nutrition and Mental Health. She leveraged technology to scale up a ten-year-old digital health initiative pilot across the state, which was launched by the Prime Minister in October 2017 and given the name TeCHO (technology enabled Community Health Operations). With her focused and result-oriented leadership over the last four years in the Health sector, with a large number of innovative, strategic interventions and initiatives, the performance of the state in the health sector underwent a dramatic transformation. In the SDG India Index by NITI & United Nations, Gujarat’s performance for Goal 3 – Good Health & Well-Being has significantly improved. From the 17th rank in 2018-19, Gujarat moved to the 8th position in 2019-20, and obtained the first rank across the states of India, with a score of 86 for 2020-21 in the SDG India Index report released in June this year.

As chairperson of the UN Mehta Institute of Cardiology & Research, she led the team to enable the dedication to the nation of the country’s largest Cardiac care facility, with over 1200 beds. During her tenure as Principal Secretary, Health, Gujarat’s handling and response to COVID has been appreciated and documented by WHO along with IIM, Ahmedabad and IIPH, Gandhinagar in the Intra Action Review. A case study on the Gujarat response to COVID has been published by IIM, Ahmedabad on Gujarat’s response to COVID under her administrative leadership.

In this period she also promoted a study by the Gujarat government’s AYUSH [Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, eds.] department, with the approval of an expert allopathic committee into the effectiveness of using Ayurveda treatment along with standard allopathic treatment on COVID-19 patients. The study was conducted on two groups of patients admitted in the 1200-bed COVID facility in a hospital in Ahmadabad. One group received standard allopathic treatment, the other a government-approved combination of Ayurvedic and allopathic treatments. The second group of patients was shown to recover faster compared to those who received only standard allopathic treatment. Dr. Ravi spoke about this treatment in a talk with members of the World Ayurveda Foundation. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM8vIT1t35o).

Dr. Ravi is known for living a simple lifestyle. She is passionate about hatha yoga and carnatic singing. Some of her recitals are available on YouTube, such as the musical tribute Walking to Freedom she gave in 2007 at the Mahatma Gandhi Ashram at Sabarmati, Ahmadabad, Gujarat. (see https://youtu.be/wQf6CPwbcTU).


Dr. Ravi is active on Twitter (twitter.com/jayantiravi/), 

Facebook (facebook.com/jayantiravi/,) and Instagram 

(instagram.com/p/Bjp3_u1jjMc/).