This journey is the stuff dreams are made of. From working as a ticket checker working for the South Central Railways at the Purna Junction in Maharashtra, G. Shrikant is today an IAS officer. The 25-year-old is currently municipal commissioner of the Nanded Waghala Municipal Corporation. Son of marginal farmer Narsappa from Jawalgera, a village in Raichur district of Karnataka on the Andhra-Karnataka border, Shrikant completed his matriculation from a school in Kurnool and passed his Intermediate examination from the Railway Junior College, Secunderabad. Following this he was employed as a ticket collector by the South Central Railway.
While he was working, Shrikant completed his B.Com through distance education form Osmania University, Hyderabad. His dreams and aspirations, however, would not let him stop there and he decided to try for the Indian Administrative Services. “My colleagues and supervisors in South Central...
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Railway encouraged and accommodated me,” says Shrikant.
After missing out in 2008, Shrikant cracked the IAS examination in 2009. Following his training at Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration at Mussoorie, he was given the Maharashtra cadre and posted as Assistant Collector of the tribal taluka Kinwat. Currently he is the Municipal Commissioner of the Nanded Waghala municipal corporation. The bachelor openly admits that it was his fiancée Sonam Awasthi who had inspired and motivated him to take the UPSC examination as a challenge.
He says he would regularly read newspapers for current affairs and for general knowledge he would depend on the Civil Services Chronicle and Competition Wizard. Besides English, Shrikant is fluent in five Indian languages. His mother tongue is Kannada and his second language in school and junior college was Telugu. He also knows Tamil, Hindi and of course Marathi since he worked in Maharashtra’s Parbhani and Nanded districts for seven years.
Stating that he is aware that the Indian bureaucracy has earned a bad name for being slow and corrupt, he says, “One must become part of a system if one wants to change and improve it.” Shrikant, who has become a role model for all young men and women who are in Class III and Class IV jobs and who aspire to crack the IAS examination, says that during his Railways days, while his colleagues would fraternise with each other or with commuters during their free time, he would read vociferously. The tenacity and dedication surely paid off.