Making Every Drop Count

As Banda DM, promotee IAS officer Hira Lal made the backward UP district shine on several fronts,

- Namita Bajpai

On a chilly December night of 2018, a frail old woman was sitting on a charpoy in front of her house on the outskirts of Banda, shivering and cursing her poverty which couldn’t afford her a quilt a or blanket when someone wrapped a warm woollen shawl around her. “Kuan, kaun hain aap (who are you)?” she asked, startled by the gesture. “I am your district magistrate,” came the reply.

This was not a one-off act of kindness for Hira Lal who covered the woman with his own shawl, such humane gestures have been a way of life for him.

A 1994 batch PCS officer who was promoted to the IAS in 2010, Hira Lal, now additional project director at Uttar Pradesh Aids Control Society, is a bureaucrat with many feathers to his cap. But his stint as the DM of Banda, the backward district in parched Bundelkhand , stands out.

Plagued by multiple challenges such as water scarcity, perennial drought and malnutrition and deforestation, Banda witnessed a makeover when Hira Lal helmed the district administration from August 2018 to February 2020.