Mr. Harssh A Poddar is an officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) borne on the Maharashtra cadre. He is an Oxford-educated lawyer and a Chevening scholar who has worked in corporate law with a magic circle law firm in London, before returning to India to pursue a career in law enforcement. He is presently posted as the Commanding Officer of the Maharashtra armed police in Amravati.
A recipient of the Best Officer Award and the Home Minister’s Award for National Integration during the IPS training, Mr. Poddar has strived to change the perception of citizens towards the police. His work has focused on youth empowerment and deradicalization. The Maharashtra Police Youth Parliament Project, conceptualized by him, created an outreach of over 200,000 youth for the Maharashtra Police. He is also credited with the launch of an innovative project, Udaan, that provided free career guidance to thousands of students in communally sensitive regions of the state.
In 2018, Mr. Poddar undertook an extensive campaign against mob violence prompted by misinformation in Malegaon. He also led an operation in which a family was successfully rescued from a violent mob in the city. As part of the SMART police initiative, he has been recreating rural police stations with a view towards providing urban standards of police service-delivery in interior Maharashtra. He has successfully headed the investigation of several organized crimes and has also authored a book on the law relating to investment frauds.
In recent years his work on pandemic law enforcement has become a case study in COVID policing. As the Superintendent of Police of Beed district, the effective implementation by his team of the national lockdown ensured that not a single case of infection was reported in the district during the lockdown. During the devastating second wave, the scientific measures he undertook in the armed police have become a template for protecting frontline workers in the face of a pandemic.
Pursuing a master’s in public administration as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School will help Mr. Poddar to complement the fundamentals of law enforcement policy and global security with his experience in field policing and handling law and order. After completing the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s program, he intends to work at the federal and state level in areas relating to security and law enforcement.