Bureaucracy is perhaps the most powerful instrument of the statecraft and if it decides to make a difference in the lives of the people, there is hardly anything which can stop it. One such example was recently seen in Chhattisgarh’s Ambikapur city in Surguja district where an IAS turned the town from a stinking place to a clean town where people would love to live.

Ritu Sain, a 2003-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, recalls the state of the town when she first landed here.