gfiles magazine

January 24, 2017

Golden Girl

For Sudha Pillai, the former Member Secretary of the Planning Commission, the inspiration to join the civil services came quite early in life-in fact, when she was not even ten years of age.Sudha Khanna (Pillai after marriage) met Sarla Grewal, India’s second woman IAS officer, when she was barely eight-year-old. Grewal, then Director of Public Instruction (commonly known as DPI), had come for an annual day function in her Senior Modern School, Chandigarh. She handed over the prize-The Hungry Strones, a book by Rabindranath Tagore-to her. With the prize, it seems, Grewal also gave Sudha Khanna inspiration to be a civil servant. “There I decided to be an IAS,” she recollects, with the incident still etched in her memory.

No comments:

Post a Comment