With complaints against her escalating each week and the charge that she could not stop the state's $ 450 million budget from shooting up by $ 12 million, 38-year-old Uma Ahluwalia is no more the head of Washington State's child welfare system.
Her department was entrusted with looking after nearly 10,000 children in foster-care homes across the state.
Officially the embattled Ahluwalia resigned but had she not done so, the state governor was prepared to sack her.
Ahluwalia, a nationally known childcare expert, was also known as an aggressive agent of change.
Today her admirers are baffled as to what went wrong in her short Washington State tenure.
Some believe that the child welfare problem in the state was too big for anyone to handle, and the extra millions she spent went into hiring nearly 20 people who were expected to streamline the services and stop the system from collapsing.
The Hyderabad-raised Ahluwalia had built a reputation in the past decade as one of the most astute bureaucrats dealing with child welfare. Her high profile reforms of welfare agencies in Washington, DC, and Maryland led her to Seattle nearly 20 months ago with a $100,000 annual salary.
Her dismissal, welcomed by the local newspapers as a punishment to the many mistakes attributed to her, has led the mother of two children into silence, at least for now.
Even then there were a few people who sort of defended her in public while some wondered if she had been made a scapegoat for the recurring nightmares in her department caused by entrenched bureaucrats.
'I feel bad for Uma,' Charles Shelan, who chairs the Washington State Coalition of Children's Residential Services, told the local newspapers. 'She's very bright, very articulate, but this problem, this entire cascade of events, just overwhelmed her.'
Her troubles started even as she was settling down in her new job when 2-year-old Rafael Gomez of Ephrata died of child abuse. Ahluwalia was not three days into her new job.
The newspapers wrote at length on the starvation and dehydration of Kent brothers Raiden and Justice Robinson last November. A recent report into the two deaths points to critical lapses by Child Protective Services, which is under the Children's Administration under Ahluwalia. It is the report and the $12 million extra expenditure that doomed her tenure, officials in Seattle believe.
She had begun attracting the attention of the administrators across America following her success in running social services in Prince George's County, Maryland.
She was known for her inspiring leadership, and while she was compassionate, she was also demanding. A few years ago she became congressional liaison for the District of Columbia's child-welfare services.
Ahluwalia, who isn't speaking at the moment, is expected to defend her reputation and offer an explanation for the bureaucratic sloth that thwarted many of her progressive initiatives.
She holds a master's degree in social work from Delhi University and a degree in public health from George Washington University.
When she took over the foster care administration in Seattle, she had declared that she did not think the system in the state had broken down. But it needed to be fixed fast.
She was deeply concerned the way many children were sent to foster parents without proper evaluation, and then sent to another set of foster parents when the previous arrangement did not work out. But right now, all her best intentions and plans are overcome by the scandals attributed to her.
