THE new sunday express Voices Anand Neelakantan Anuja Chandramouli Ravi Shankar Ajai Sahni Deepali Bhardwaj Swami Sukhabodhananda MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment march 8 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Social Mediums Bureaucrats are using the power of social media to humanise governance By Suruchi Kapur Gomes Parveen Kaswan B ehind every highway ribbon-cutting, every vaccination drive, every election queue that curls around a government school, stands the Indian bureaucracy—a roughly 10 million–strong public workforce across the Union and states, including 5,000-plus officers of the elite All India Services such as the IAS, IPS, and IFoS. India inherited its steel frame from the Raj. Yet the verdict on bureaucrats swings wildly . To some, they are nation-builders who carried out land reforms, Green Revolution logistics, and the mammoth exercise of conducting the world’s largest elections. To others, they embody red tape—slow files, opaque corridors, and colonial hauteur dressed in khadi. Now, however, India’s bureaucracy is undergoing a visible, and at times dramatic, transition into the public square of social media. District collectors and police commissioners who once communicated through typed press notes now post real-time updates on X and Instagram. During floods in Assam, district administrations have used Twitter threads to announce rescue helplines and relief camp locations within minutes. Police departments in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru respond to traffic complaints on social media, tagging field officers, and resolving issues publicly A pothole . complaint that earlier required multiple visits to a municipal office can now be geotagged, photographed, and escalated in a single post. This digital turn has altered the texture of governance. For many Indian bureaucrats, the holy grail isn’t the Padma Shri. It’s the blue tick. In a leaked WhatsApp group titled “Civil Cervix”, officers debated whether to DM Elon Musk after new verification rules dropped. “I should be verified by default,” wrote one. “I cleared Prelims and Mains.” Another protested, “I handle two districts, four floods, and one unpredictable CM. At least give me Twitter Analytics.” And why not? If Descartes were alive today he’d probably say: “I post, , therefore I am.” Consider Divya Hosur—IAS (2012), Defence Estates Officer for Karnataka & Goa. On a blazing November afternoon in Goa, her ponytail bobbing in the heat, she crossed the finish line of her first Ironman race. The same tenacity powers her day job: fending off encroachment on defence land, navigating between the armed forces’ non-negotiable discipline and state governments’ welfare-driven compulsions. Her trajectory runs from a Kannada-medium school in Chitradurga to the Defence Estates Service, with earlier stints in the PMO (international cooperation) and Bangalore Metro (where WhatsApp ticketing took shape). Her governance philosophy is disarmingly simple: be accessible. With no complaint portal at the Metro, she shared her number and was flooded with messages on dust, noise, waste, breakdowns, trees. Off-duty she seeks stillness. Saris are , her armour, vipassana her anchor, poetry her compass. “External stimuli does not unnerve me,” she smiles. Shreyas Hosur—her husband and fellow civil servant—provides the countercurrent. When Shreyas ran the 20 Bridges Marathon, Divya was his crew for nine relentless hours. Later she wrote on Instagram: “I wish to be not just his Sita, but also his Lakshmana—his Hanuman with devotion, his Vibheeshana with counsel, even his Jatayu with courage.” If bureaucracy has found its content era, the Hosurs have given it narrative depth—romance, resilience, and a reminder that identity must exceed rank. The age of the content bureaucrat isn’t just about flexing, trending, or getting verified. It’s about reclaiming visibility in a system that often erases its own foot soldiers. In the end, whether through Reels, dashboards, flood banks, or Ironmans, a newer message is emerging: Power doesn’t just govern anymore. It performs. It connects. In Bengaluru, a single tweet from the new BDA Commissioner sparked a quiet upheaval: “If you have a long-pending grievance… send a photocopy to the BDA helpline.” Days later, citizens lined up with paperwork— and walked out with issues finally resolved. For Major Manivannan Ponniah, invention comes from necessity Born in Bodinayakanur to . a lower-middle-class SC family he , dreamed of DRDO, cleared NDA, IFS, Jaldapara National Park, West Bengal Last year he won the Eco Warrior Award for crushing rhino poaching networks. He avoids social-media posturing, yet villagers, students and wildlife buffs treat him as the fastest responder online. His posts blend conservation and history Divya Hosur Defence Estates Officer, Karnataka & Goa Her governance philosophy is disarmingly simple: be accessible. With no complaint portal at the Metro, she shared her number and was flooded with messages on dust, noise, waste, breakdowns, trees. When a predator began uploading explicit videos of commuters, she rallied social media; the account vanished within hours services—where the soldier’s speed met the bureaucrat’s deliberation. In Mysuru, encroachment drives earned him the “Demolition Man” moniker; he prefers “accessible.” During Covid, accessibility became lifeline—1,300-plus cases closed via social media. Twitter doubled as complaint desk and reality check. For once, people were talking to the state without intermediaries. Now, as Principal Secretary and BDA Commissioner, the terrain is tougher—Bengaluru’s land, infrastructure, and corruption. But the ethos is unchanged: “If you sit in Vidhana Soudha and don’t connect with the common man, there is a problem.” Integrity for him, is non-negotiable. , Harvard taught him honesty is relative. Military training left its imprint; on Twitter he calls himself “half-ignorant, half-rebellious, full optimist, soldier.” At the Mahakumbh 2025, GS Naveen Kumar watched pilgrims step into a newly unified Ganga—the product of a massive river management exercise that fused three strands into one flow, added 22 hectares of bathing space, reclaimed 800 acres, and digitally logged 660 million visitors. Before Uttar Pradesh, he overhauled Andhra Pradesh’s health stack, winning seven national awards. His rule of thumb: “If there’s a long queue, the system is wrong.” Now he’s building digital twins for dam safety pushing laptops , in UP and preparing for India’s shift , to non-communicable diseases where early digital screening is key . The Chennai-bred engineer picked the UPSC in seventh grade, studied 15 hours a day is now Secretary Irriga, , tion and Water Resources Department, UP and heads the state arm of the , Uma Mahadevan Additional Chief Secretary and Development Commissioner, Karnataka Her posts move between panchayat libraries, Adam Tooze charts, Marcus Aurelius quotes and disability rights. Scholars, students and policy nerds flock to her book reviews and governance essays as much as to her updates from the field. Offline, the former French teacher paints and reads; online she reminds a hurried society that reform needs time, context and curiosity Turn to page 2 trained at IMA, worked in industry , then finally landed in the civil