From Delhi's slum protests to Los Angeles mayor: The making of Nithya Raman

Harvard-educated Raman worked with slum dwellers in Delhi, founded a civic data initiative in Chennai and took up homelessness in Los Angeles before entering electoral politics in 2020.

When she returned to India after living in the US, Nithya V Raman did the unthinkable - working with NGOs engaged with slum dwellers and leading movements against their eviction ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. This week, the 45-year-old Indian-American scripted history, becoming Los Angeles's first mayor of South Asian descent.

Nithya has been serving as a Los Angeles City Council member since 2020. Born in 1981 in Thrissur, Keralam, Nithya briefly lived on Ramasamy Kovil Street in East Fort, Thiruvananthapuram, where her father, Venkitaraman, worked at KELTRON, a state-run public enterprise, and her mother, Sudha Kechery, worked with India Overseas Bank. A few years later, when her father flew to the US for higher studies, the family moved back to Thrissur, where she attended kindergarten. She moved to the US when she was around six.

The family initially settled in Burlington, Massachusetts. She obtained a degree in social studies from Harvard University, where she met her future husband, Vali Chandrasekharan, a TV screenwriter from Tamil Nadu. She then returned to India and began working with NGOs engaged with slum dwellers in Delhi, where she led movements against the eviction of slum dwellers ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Later, Nithya moved to Chennai, where she founded the nonprofit outfit Transparent Chennai in 2010. Along with her co-founders, she pushed the city to invest in sanitation facilities in unmapped slums using data. They mapped public toilets in the city's poorest neighbourhoods, documented bus routes and campaigned against policies that led to slum evictions. This served as a launch pad for Nithya's future political career and interventions in Los Angeles.

In 2013, she returned to Los Angeles, where she initially worked as a management trainee at the city administrative office. She was tasked with preparing a report examining the city's expenditure on homelessness. To address the issue, she founded the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition in 2017. Her engagement with homelessness in the city eventually drew her into local politics.

In 2020, she made history by defeating incumbent David Ryu to become the first challenger in 17 years to unseat a sitting Los Angeles City Council member. She retained her District 4 seat in 2024.