From Delhi’s slum protests to Los Angeles mayor: The making of Nithya Raman

When she returned to India after living in the US, Nithya V Raman did the unthinkable – working with NGOs engaged with slum dwellers and leading movements against their eviction ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. This week, the 45-year-old Indian-American scripted history, becoming Los Angeles’s first mayor of South Asian descent.

Nithya has been serving as a Los Angeles City Council member since 2020. Born in 1981 in Thrissur, Keralam, Nithya briefly lived on Ramasamy Kovil Street in East Fort, Thiruvananthapuram, where her father, Venkitaraman, worked at KELTRON, a state-run public enterprise, and her mother, Sudha Kechery, worked with India Overseas Bank.

Abdul El-Sayed’s US Senate win gives Karnataka coastal town a reason to celebrate The family initially settled in Burlington, Massachusetts.

She obtained a degree in social studies from Harvard University, where she met her future husband, Vali Chandrasekharan, a TV screenwriter from Tamil Nadu. She then returned to India and began working with NGOs engaged with slum dwellers in Delhi, where she led movements against the eviction of slum dwellers ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.