She is the second woman in the Indian Armed Forces to be promoted to a three-star rank, after Surgeon Vice Admiral Punita Arora.

Bandopadhyay was born as Padmavathy Swaminathan on 4 November 1944 at Tirupathi, Andhra Pradesh into a Tamil speaking Iyer family.

As a result, Padma's thoughts have been consumed with medical difficulties since she was a small child, and she also took on the role of her mother's primary caretaker while she was still quite young.

In addition, her neighbor in the Gole Market neighborhood in New Delhi was Dr. S. I. Padmavati, Professor of Medicine at Lady Hardinge Medical College.

After graduating from school, she made the difficult and uncommon transition from humanities to the science stream in Delhi University.