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| (Left) Rohtas superintendent of police Manu Maharaj and the trainee IAS officers at Rohtas fort on Monday. Picture by Sanjay Choudhary |
Patna, July 31: Pankaj Dixit, a 2011 Bihar cadre IAS officer, is on a familiarisation trip to the rebel-affected districts of Bihar where he would be posted in around a year.
A resident of Rai Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, Pankaj is one among seven IAS officers who are on a week-long visit to Bihar. On the trip that started on Sunday, the officers have spent two days in Rohtas and a day in Gaya.
The smooth drive and the improved law and order situation in the rebel-affected districts, coupled with the feeling that officers in Bihar have the “freedom to work without political interference”, have made Pankaj happy.
“Our next place of visit is Bhagalpur via Munger. The smooth drive along the roads in the state is fascinating. I couldn’t believe that these roads are the same that I had travelled on in 2000. The bureaucracy in the state has also changed and the officials enjoy more freedom in work now,” he said.
Mithilesh Mishra, a resident of Mau in Uttar Pradesh, shared experiences of his visit to the historic Rohtas fort. He said he did not have to face any problem during the visit on Monday. “I had heard that the Naxalite problem posed a great threat to the state’s law and order machinery. But I don’t think so after I visited Rohtas, which was earlier used as a training centre of newly recruited Maoists.”
Pankaj and Mithilesh are among the nine IAS officers of the 2011 batch allotted to Bihar. While three of the nine have been unable to make the week-long trip for various reasons, a 2007-batch officer, Dinesh Kumar, who had not joined his posting earlier, has come on the trip.
Mithilesh, who was earlier selected for the Indian Police Service (IPS), said the better condition of the state all depended on how officials handled the problems at hand. “The experience that I gained from the visit to Rohtas Fort, where a programme was organised under community policing, will certainly help me in the discharge of duty from a district,” he said. Two other IAS officers — Rahul Kumar and Tyag Rajan from East Champaran in Bihar and Tamil Nadu respectively — were also selected for the IPS earlier.
Others allotted the Bihar cadre in 2011 are Nawada resident Mahendra Kumar, Banka resident Alok Ranjan Ghosh, Himanshu Sharma (from Uttar Pradesh) and Nilesh Devre and Kapil A. Srisatya (from Maharashtra). Himanshu and the two candidates from Maharashtra have not come on the trip.
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