- Tuesday, October 03, 2023
Sudha Murty, the mother of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata, is the recipient of Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award in India
By: Pramod Thomas
The mother-in-law of prime minister Rishi Sunak, Sudha Murty, has said that the UK immigration officer looked at her incredulously when she mentioned 10 Downing Street as her London address.
“They asked me my residential address. My elder sister was with me and I thought should I write ’10 Downing Street’. My son also lives there (in UK), but I didn’t remember his complete address. But I finally wrote 10 Downing Street,” Sudha Murty, mother of Sunak’s wife Akshata, said during the Kapil Sharma chat show.
“The immigration officer looked at me incredulously and asked: “Are you joking?!”
Murty told the officer that she was just telling the truth.
“No one believes that I, a 72-year-old simple lady, can be the mother-in-law of the prime minister,” she added.
Murty hit the headlines last month when she said that her daughter made Sunak ‘the prime minister of Britain’.
She also revealed that she had persuaded Sunak to fast every Thursday in honour of a Hindu guru the family worship.
Recently, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award in India. She has also been honuored with numerous other awards for her contributions to literature and social work.
She has established several foundations that provide education and healthcare to underprivileged communities in India.
Murty was the only female student at an engineering college she studied at in the late 1960s in Karnataka in southern India.
In 1974, she became the first female engineer to be hired by the Tata group.
After meeting her husband, she helped him set up consulting and IT services firm Infosys in 1981.
According to reports, the IT firm is now worth around £50 billion, with Akshata’s stake valued at hundreds of millions of pounds.
