Devyani Khobragade
| Devyani Khobragade | |
|---|---|
| Native name | देवयानी खोब्रागडे |
| Born | Tarapur, Maharashtra, India |
| Nationality | India |
| Citizenship | India |
| Occupation | Indian Foreign Service Officer |
| Years active | 1999-date |
| Employer | Government of India |
| Organization | Ministry of External Affairs (India) |
| Spouse(s) | Dr. Aakash Singh Rathore |
| Children | 2 daughters |
| Parent(s) | Uttam Khobragade (father) |
Devyani Khobragade is an Indian Foreign Service officer. While serving as Indian Deputy Consul General in New York, she made international headlines when she was arrested by US law enforcement for making false statements on a visa application for her housekeeper, paying her maid $3.99 an hour despite promising on the maid's visa application to pay the minimum legal wage. Khobragade was arrested after dropping off her daughters at school in Manhattan. She was subjected to a body-cavity search commonly called a "strip search", presented to a judge and released the same day. This led to a major diplomatic standoff between India and the United States. In 2016, she entered the world of fiction with her first book, "The White Sari".
Khobragade was born in Tarapur, Maharashtra, into a prominent Dalit family from Gadchiroli, Maharashtra. She attended Mount Carmel High School in Mumbai. She obtained a degree in medicine from King Edward Memorial Hospital and Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College. While doing an MS in Ophthalmology, Khobragade decided to become a civil servant.
Khobragade joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1999. She has been posted in Germany, Italy and Pakistan. In 2012, she was posted to the Consulate General of India in New York where she worked as Deputy Consul General till December 2013. She handled women's affairs as well as political and economic issues. On 6 April 2013 Khobragade told the Indian Panorama newspaper that her "ambition is to have direct impact on a foreign policy for underprivileged women". As a Dalit woman, Khobragade provided her personal perspective on Women's Rights and the Influence of Demographics in India at the Australian Consulate-General in New York in April 2013.
On 20 January 2014 she was posted to New Delhi as director of the Development Partnership Administration (DPA), an agency formed in 2013 at the Ministry of External Affairs to handle India's projects overseas. In December 2014 the Ministry of External Affairs removed her from this post and placed her on "compulsory wait". In July 2015 she was reinstated as a director in the Ministry of External Affairs, this time in its State Governments division. She chose to work with Kerala, aiming to promote its interests overseas in areas like investment, culture, tourism and the well being of its large diaspora in the Gulf countries.
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