The Story of Tanu Shree Pareek, India’s First Woman BSF Combat Officer

Guwahati, July 18, 2019:

Tanu Shree Pathak is a trailblazer, a breaker of the glass-ceiling. After all, she broke the BSF’s 51-year-old record of not having a single woman in combat until 2016!

In February 2016, Bikaner-girl Pareek became the first woman to join the force in the officer rank after she cleared the all-India exam conducted by the UPSC in 2014. A year after that, in March 2017, the then Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh put the rank stars on the shoulders of Pareek during the piping ceremony, which also saw her leading the passing out parade of 67 trainee officers.

Which decisions in her life led her to this profession, you might ask?  While speaking to shethepeople.tv, she reveals that she always had a knack for the outdoors and was the kind of student who would participate often in extra-curricular activities like playing badminton, joining judo classes and the NCC etc.

Till 10^th, she was not sure of what she wanted to do, but uniform and forces had always attracted her. Then when I joined an engineering college and enrolled in NCC, she realized that she didn’t want to work with machines.

In 2009-10, she was a part of the NCC, which is where she wore the uniform and went to different camps and parades.

Pareek was the only woman in the training camp of 67 male members in the academy in Tekanpur, but she never let gender get in the way and has scripted a remarkable success story.

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