IAS officer Chander Shekhar, who had introduced the initiative of night stays at villages, retired from the service after over 33 years Wednesday. Chander Shekhar had joined the Haryana Civil Services (HCS) in 1989 and was promoted as an IAS officer in 2011. He was the commissioner of the Hisar division before retiring.
As deputy commissioner of Kaithal, Chander Shekhar in 2012 had started the concept of night stays in villages. Under this initiative, Chander Shekhar, along with all district-level officers, used to stay in a village periodically to gain first-hand experience of the problems being faced by villagers. Under this initiative, the officers used to resolve the problems faced by villagers on the spot.
Later as the director general of the school education department too, Chander Shekhar continued his initiative by spending a night at a school almost every Friday to interact with teachers. The next day, he used to interact with students of the same school to resolve their problems.
As Faridabad DC in 2016, Chander Shekhar had allotted a village to one officer to ensure its all-around development. On November 1, 2021, the Haryana government too launched a similar scheme for “adoption” of the villages by officers in the entire state.
Most recently, during his tenure as the commissioner of the Hisar division, over 30,000 files related to the judgements of the division’s revenue court were digitised which will facilitate their easy access to the people of the four districts of Hisar, Fatehabad, Sirsa and Jind.
Chander Shekhar told The Indian Express that the exercise was being carried out for the past nearly one and a half years. Chander Shekhar said: “The Hisar division came into existence in 1973. Since then, the appeals related to village common land and other land disputes were being heard in the divisional court. In the absence of digitisation, it was difficult to locate files of a specific case. Realising this problem, I ordered to weed out the unnecessary files and digitise the remaining documents. This exercise will provide documents to the people in response to the RTI applications too.”
National Informatics Centre (NIC) senior technical director M P Kulsreshtha said as many as 8,000 files of the divisional office have also been digitised. As part of the exercise, a modern record room has been set up in Hisar’s divisional office.
Meanwhile, on Monday, additional chief secretary (revenue) P K Das launched the first divisional commissioner (Hisar) website of the state which has the details of all four districts of the Hisar division. The website https://commhsr.haryana.gov.in will have historical information on the districts under the division as well as information related to citizen charter, tourist places, and wildlife.
Das, who also retired on Wednesday, suggested that copies of important records of the four districts should also be made available on this website so that the common man can know their history.