Biography Of Lieutenant Colonel Mitali Madhumita

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Major Mitali Madhumita became the first woman officer to receive a gallantry award in the Army. Madhumita was leading the army’s English Language Training Team in Kabul when the suicide bombers struck guest house Noor.
Without bothering too much about her personal safety Mitali Madhumita, then on a United Nations’ mission in Kabul, thrust herself headlong to save precious lives buried under the debris when the Indian embassy in Kabul suffered a terror attack on February 26, 2011.

Madhumita joined the army in the year 2000 on a short service commission. She was part of the Army Education Corps and served in Kabul, Afghanistan as a part of the army’s English Language Training program.
Madhumita was also posted in sensitive areas like Jammu-Kashmir and the northeast of the Indian state.
In 2016 Supreme court of India rejected the Ministry of Defence’s plea against granting her a permanent commission in the Indian army

Lt Col Mitali Madhumita can still smell the acrid smell of burst grenades mixed with burning human flesh when, occasionally, her mind takes her back to that awful early morning of February 26, 2010, in Kabul.
That was the day Hamid guesthouse was bombed by extremists of the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-e-Taiba-terror groups, US intelligence would learn later, sent by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, to target Indians in Afghanistan.

“There was cross-firing all around me and the militants were throwing Chinese incendiary grenades. I couldn’t see the militants but they were hiding somewhere around me. I searched through the debris and before long started pulling out bodies,” Madhumita said in an interview soon after the attack.