Satna girl, 7 SSB rejections, a broken spine — now Lieutenant Shivani Jha
Satna: In a small town in Satna, Madhya Pradesh, Pratibha Jha repeated one line so often it stopped sounding like a wish — “One day my daughter will definitely become an officer.”Last September, it became a rank and a uniform.
Her daughter, Shivani Jha, was commissioned as Lieutenant in the Indian Army in September 2025 after joining the Officers Training Academy in September 2024.
Raised on equal terms with her younger brother, Shivani was enrolled in Satna’s only ICSE school — considered the best in the city — by her father Sanjeev Jha, a factory supervisor, and mother Pratibha, a homemaker. In a town where families often sent daughters to Hindi-medium schools to save money, they chose differently.”They gave me wings to fly. They never held me back,” Shivani says.
After completing her BE in Electronics from Madhav Institute of Technology and Science, Gwalior in 2020, Shivani joined TCS and later a cybersecurity firm, working remotely during the pandemic.
Alongside her full-time job, she pursued the Services Selection Board (SSB) — the five-day personality test for defence officers. She first cleared screening in February 2020 without coaching.
What followed was years of setbacks: medical disqualification for Air Force entry requiring eye surgery, multiple screen-outs, a health scare in Kolkata, and faltering confidence in interviews.”I didn’t take a break. I didn’t take a drop year,” she says. She prepared before and after work, on weekends.
The toughest blow came in May 2023 during an SSB attempt in Bengaluru, when an accident left her with fractures to D12 and L5 vertebrae. She spent three months on complete bed rest and six more months before she could run again.”It felt like they were giving me a second life,” she says of her parents who became her caregivers.
Before her final attempt in Jalandhar, Punjab, she cut her hair short — a small change her father had long suggested. “After that, I felt more confident — like a different person,” she recalls.
This time, she was recommended. She resigned from her corporate job the night she got her joining letter.”I made up my mind that I wanted this — no matter how many failures it took, I stayed consistent,” she says. In Satna, her mother’s old sentence no longer needs repeating.
