The woman in the Instagram post looks chic in her black dress and silver jewellery. “Hi! I’m Sirisha Raju. I’m 28 years old and I’m a pilot,” she says in the post. She is articulate and her body language conveys confidence. Her filigree danglers seem to nod in agreement, and one can easily imagine her steering an aircraft through the clouds.
“I’ll cry if I start telling you about my first solo,” Raju tells The Telegraph over a video call. “When I put on the uniform that day, I sent a picture to my father and he was in tears. I felt like I was a blessed child of god, even though he gave me hurdles.” That was December 13, 2024.
Raju is a private pilot working towards a commercial pilot license. It’s a long process and requires big money.
Raju was born and brought up in Bondamunda, a small town in Odisha. Her roots lie in Andhra Pradesh but her father worked with the railways in Odisha. “We were financially very weak. My grandfather’s job was passed on to my father,” she says. Raju’s father had five siblings, and there was just this one job. Her grandmother wanted the entire salary to be handed to her. The matter was taken to court, which pronounced a 50-50 sharing. “My father had to give them ₹750 while we had ₹750. This was 1998,” she says.
Raju owes it all to her parents. “There was only one English medium school in Bondamunda those days, a private school. My father chose to put me there. It is because of that one decision I am where I am today. Even though he never sat and taught me — he himself hadn’t passed Class X — he made sure I did.”
And so it was hammered into Raju and her younger sister — currently prepping for her medical entrance — that education was the only option. “We also adopted a girl child 10 years ago,” she smiles.
In Class VIII, Raju was bitten by the astronaut bug. An aunt who lived in the US would send pictures of Nasa — rockets, satellites and so on. And in the young girl’s mind, the sky began to take the shape of a vast playground.
It was this urge to fly that made her reject computer engineering after Class XII. “That was what everyone was doing; I didn’t want that for myself although I scored well in JEE.”
She told her parents what she wanted to do — aeronautical engineering. Her father asked her what it even meant. “I want to stay close to planes because that is what fascinates me,” she told him.
The young woman has something to say to all the girls out there with dreams in their heads. “It’s important to understand that everything is achievable; you just have to work hard,” she says, gesturing with her hands in an effort to make it more pithy. However, treading off the beaten path is not for the faint-hearted. Says Raju, “There are many stones that’ll be thrown at you and I have taken all the stones. In fact, some even call me the book of wrong decisions.”
The oft-repeated saying goes that whenyou want something sincerely, all the universe conspires in helping you. One day her father came home and said, “You know what, I heard this word ‘aeronautical’ today. I can connect you to that person.” For Raju, this was “a sign from the universe”.
As for the relations and “well-wishers” who advised her otherwise, she simply showed them her admission letter to aeronautics at the Marri Laxman Reddy Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. The college gave her a quotation of ₹12 lakh for the four-year programme. Her father took an initial loan and off she left for Hyderabad, a city she had visited just once earlier.
The fuel her father provided was endless. “Every vacation, he would say ‘Why do you want to come home? Go somewhere, explore, understand yourself… Use your train passes’.” She, however, did land up home unannounced. Sure enough, within seven days, she started missing the hustle and bustle of “doing something”.
Around the second year, an idea took shape. “Agar plane bananey mein itna maza aa raha hai, toh udaney mein kitna maza ayega… If putting together an airplane is so exciting, imagine flying it!” she pauses, as if to allow me space to comprehend her momentous ambition. “If I cannot reach space, I can at least reach the skies.”
It was “just a dream” but Raju was getting closer to it.
She says, “I was in a big city, Internet was free, the subjects were interesting and I was a good student — I passed engineering with an 89 per cent.” She also got to build remote planes, go for competitions, win the prize money and gestate new ideas.
Internships and jobs with airline companies came, but they were nothing close to flying. Systems and maintenance did not equal “adrenaline”, and she quit.
And thus began another journey. Pilot training courses, exams, test flying… Keeping the money flowing in is still tough. Last year, Raju appealed to the Government of India for scholarships for student pilots. “Every field of education has scholarships, why not this?” is her question.
A commercial pilot license may take a while, but Raju made it to cloud nine the first time she flew solo. As she puts it, “I took a round, saw a beautiful sunset. When I landed, I was shivering out of happiness.”