Ravada Chandrasekhar
Ravada A Chandrasekhar, a Kerala cadre IPS officer of the 1991 batch was named as the new state police chief on 30th June 2025, Monday. He had been on central deputation serving as special director in the Intelligence Bureau (IB). He is a native of Godavari region of Andhra Pradesh and holds a PG in science. He started his service in the police force as an ASP at Thalassery in Kannur.
Ravada Chandrasekhar has served as SP in several districts of the Kerala state apart from his services with Railways, Vigilance Ernakulam Range, Crime Branch Thiruvananthapuram and Palakkad. He has also been part of the United Nations Mission in Bosnia. He has also served as the Kochi city police commissioner and Thiruvananthapuram city police commissioner while holding the DIG rank. During his tenure as an IG in the State Crime Records Bureau, Ravada Chandrasekhar was deputed to the Intelligence Bureau as deputy director, and worked at various offices of IB in Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and Vijayawada.
During the central deputation period, he was promoted as ADGP and served as additional director of Intelligence Bureau in Vijayawada office and Mumbai office. In 2015, Ravada Chandrasekhar was conferred with the President’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service and in 2009, the Indian Police Medal for Meritorious Service was awarded to Ravada Chandrasekhar.
Shubanshu Shukla
Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla is an astronaut, Engineer and Indian Air Force test pilot. He is the first of four spacemen who has flown to space as part of the Indian Human Spaceflight Programme. He is currently in the Axiom Mission 4 team, becoming the first Indian astronaut to visit the International Space Station, and the second Indian to travel to orbit after Rakesh Sharma in 1984. He is a pilot with approximately 2,000 hours of flying experience in various aircrafts like MiG-21, Mig-29, Jaguar, Hawk etc.
Shubhanshu Shukla was inspired by the 1999 Kargil War fought against Pakistan and joined National Defense Academy. He completed his military training and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the National Defence Academy in 2005. He was then selected for the flying branch and got trained at the IAF (Indian Air Force) Academy. Shubanshu was commissioned into the Fighter stream of the Indian Air Force as a Flying officer, in June 2006. Shukla is married to Kamna Mishra, a dentist by profession, who was Shubhanshu's classmate at school. The couple is blessed with a son. In 2019, Shubanshu was included in the astronaut selection process in 2019 by the Institute of Aerospace Medicine (IAM), an organization for the Indian Human Spaceflight Programme. After completing the training at Russia in 2021, he returned to India and attended training at the Astronaut Training Facility in Bengaluru. In the meantime, he completed his Masters in aerospace engineering from IISc, Bengaluru.
As a member of the astronaut team for India's first human space mission, his name was was formally announced on 27 February 2024 at ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. Shubanshu Shukla is currently serving as the mission pilot for the on-going Axiom Mission 4 mission to the International Space Station. Shubanshu is the first Indian astronaut to visit the ISS, and the second Indian to travel to orbit, after cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma in 1984. The astronaut team successfully lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre located at Florida on 25 June 2025 and the vessel docked with the International Space Station, on 26 June 2025. Shubanshu entered ISS at 12:14 UTC (17:44 IST). Mission Commander Peggy Whitson gave Shubanshu his pin, designated him as astronaut number 634. Let us congratulate Shubanshu for this wonderful achievement.