Pratibha Devisingh Patil is an Indian Congress politician who is the frontrunner to become the next President of India on 19 July 2007. A lawyer by training, she is the 16th Governor of Rajasthan and its first woman governor. She is a former deputy chairperson of the upper house of Parliament, Rajya Sabha (1986-88). Earlier, from 1962 to 1985 Pratibha Patil was elected continuously to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, representing several constituencies from Jalgaon District.
From 1991-96, she was Member of Parliament from Amravati. Notably, she has never lost an election that she had contested in. Pratibha Patil was born into a Rajput family to Narayan Rao in Nadgaon, Maharashtra. She completed her M.A. from M.J. College, Jalgaon, and obtained a Law Degree from the Government Law College, Mumbai. During her college days, she excelled in table tennis, winning shields in inter-college tournaments.In 1962, Pratibha Patil was voted “College Queen” of Mooljee Jaitha (MJ) College in Jalgaon.
The same year, she got the Indian National Congress ticket to the Assembly election from Jalgaon constituency and went on to win the election with a huge margin. She married educator Devisingh Ransingh Shekhawat on July 7, 1965. The couple has a son and a daughter. Together with her husband, she set up an educational institute, Vidya Bharati Shikshan Prasarak Mandal, which runs a chain of schools and colleges in Jalgaon and Mumbai. She has also set up hostels for working women in New Delhi and Mumbai, an engineering college for rural youths in Jalgaon.
She also founded and is the chairperson of a sugar factory in Jalgaon.She was also involved in setting up an Industrial Training School for the blind in Jalgaon and running a school for poor children of Vimukta Jamatis & Nomadic Tribes. Pratibha Patil joined politics at an early age, and won her first elections to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from Jalgaon in 1962. At the age of 27, she was among the youngest[citation needed MLAs at the time. Under the mentorship of senior Congress leader and ex-Chief Minister Yashwantrao Chavan, she became a deputy minister for education after re-election in 1967 (in the Vasantrao Naik ministry).
In her next terms (1972-78) she was a full cabinet minister for the state. In successive congress governments, she handled the portfolios of tourism, social welfare and housing under several chief ministers, Vasantdada Patil, Babasaheb Bhosle, S. B. Chavan and Sharad Pawar, gaining a reputation for competence. She was continually re-elected to the assembly, either from Jalgaon or the nearby Edlabad constituencies, until 1985, when she was elected to the Rajya Sabha as a congress candidate.