Today, Colonel Sapna Rana is commanding an Army Service Corps (ASC) battalion in the Northeast. However, back in the 1980s, she was growing up in a small village in Himachal Pradesh. When kids her age spent their time playing, she was charting the course of her life. She studied at a government school in Badhlag near her village Bhawanipur in Solan district, reported Tribune.
“Of my three children, two sons and a daughter, she was the most driven – good at studies, and unrelenting. We’re from a small village, and never even imagined that our daughter could settle down beyond our village or the panchayat at most. But after Sapna did her 10th, she insisted that she would go to Solan for higher studies with her brothers,” revealed Sapna’s mother Krishna Thakur.
After moving to Solan, Sapna used to do it all, including cooking food and walking back home from college to save money. At the village, she did everything from chopping cattle-feed, milking the buffalo, to making piles of chapatis. After graduating from college, she pursued an MBA from the Himachal Pradesh University at Shimla.
“I started preparing for the Civil Services but midway, I appeared for the Combined Defence Services exam and was selected for training at the Officers’ Training Academy in Chennai,” Sapna Rana revealed.
She joined the Officers Training Academy in Chennai in 2003 and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Indian Army in 2004. Today, she is Col Sapna Rana, is married to an army officer and the couple have a daughter. She has always excelled in sports and won gold medals in cross-country training events, obstacle events, and academy endurance training.
Started from the bottom, now she’s here!