Some people have such graceful presence, even in corridors of power and authority, that your dignity (as a common citizen of the country) gets enhanced by several notches. They put you at ease instantly; boost your moral and enliven your hopes just through a few words and small gestures. How are they so effective without even asserting their power and strength directly? It's because they derive that strength from an inherent core of kindness. They are aware that they are playing a powerful role on the surface--for some greater common cause--while the inner detached core of their real Self watches with amusement and playfulness but it never gets personally attached to the play on the surface. I recently had the opportunity to feel the kind inner presence of a powerful persona on the surface.
Apart from being a writer and poet, I have continued doing my professional assignments to sustain myself, while at the same time fighting court battles for what I believe to be justice and my well-deserved, hard-earned right. After nearly two decades of struggle, despair had slowly started making its home in the armor shield of my determination. I was beginning to lose hope. At times, frustration had started setting in. It was at this stage of my struggle that I finally ended up in front of the Chief Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Haryana, Shri Rajesh Khullar ji.
What I am writing here is simply how I felt in the presence of somebody occupying such a high position. Power and authority can be intimidating to common people like us. We take it as a rule so much so that we put all powerful people in the same basket of arrogance and ego. But even a rule can't sustain without an exception. And the honorable CPS to the CM Haryana happens to be one such exception. As I stood in front of him, I faced an exceptional mix of power, strength and authority side by side with kindness, care and humbleness. Both things side by side!? They look contradictory but here in this persona they co-exist. That's what makes Khullar Sahab exceptional. His authoritative presence will instinctively turn you towards obedience and hard work; his kindness will boost your morale and enhance your self-respect. Both things pushing you towards your best.
He operates, as I see it, as the chief driving force of the Haryana bureaucracy. It is a very powerful, humungous responsibility and an equally onerous task. While waiting outside his office for my turn, I got an opportunity to witness firsthand the extraordinary range of people and matters that converge there.
There were powerful politicians, cabinet ministers, MLAs, mayors and chairmen. Then there were senior bureaucrats from different departments—IAS and IPS officers and many other senior officials from various departments. Alongside them were petitioners and seekers of justice like me, and groups of ordinary people who had come with their representations, hoping to get their problems addressed.
Sitting there, I became a firsthand witness to Shri Rajesh Khullar ji's style of functioning. His schedule was so incredibly busy that even very senior officers and politicians sometimes had to wait, because he had meetings to attend, issues to examine and tasks to get completed.
I waited there for about seven and a half hours. But believe me, the wait did not pinch me at all. Just by being there, observing all the happenings, I happened to read an entire book on state bureaucracy.
There was such busyness, such a pinpointed approach, such focus, such a bombardment of tasks of entirely different natures. One moment the matter could concern the life of an ordinary person; another could involve a powerful politician, a senior bureaucrat or a wealthy businessman. The range of people and problems that he has to attend to is enormous.
To deal with such different personality types and such varied subjects requires adaptability, quick understanding, knowledge, wisdom and, above all, experience. Just sitting there and watching people come and go became engrossing for me.
The Morning Outside His Residence
Someone had told me that Shri Rajesh Khullar ji give time to people even from his personal time, before normal office hours, early in the morning. So I went to his official residence with my representation and some of my books that I wanted to present to him.
I found dozens of people waiting in the park in front of his official residence.
Many of them appeared to be the people who had lost hope elsewhere and had ultimately reached there. As one can imagine, people in such situations become disgruntled. They lose hope. Frustration sets in. Naturally, some of them were critical of the system and the government.
I heard many people complaining about various things.
But amid all those complaints, there appeared to be a remarkable consensus about one man.
They would say, in effect: Here is an officer who is an exception. Whoever reaches the threshold of his office or residence rarely goes completely empty-handed, because he always tries to do whatever he can to help the person.
One person was particularly critical of the government. But after expressing his criticism, he immediately qualified it. He said, in substance:
“But I have no complaint against Khullar Sahab. It has been my experience for eight years, and I have never been disappointed whenever I approached him.”
Another person went even further. He remarked that politicians sometimes do things that cause them to lose votes, whereas it is officers like Khullar Sahab who actually increase votes through their positive approach, tireless hard work and willingness to help those who approach them.
These were not things being told to me later as stories. I was standing there and listening to people speak from their own experiences.
Then his personal assistant came outside and collected the applications and representations.
Even the process itself impressed me.
The staff, including the security personnel at the cabin outside the main gate, were extremely helpful. They kept accepting representations even from people who arrived slightly late. The usual time, as I understood it, was approximately 8:30 to 9:30 in the morning. Yet if somebody arrived at 9:35, I did not see that person simply being turned away. The staff would try to help. They would even provide a pen and paper to somebody who needed to write something.
Watching all this, I felt that such consideration and dedication in the surrounding system must ultimately derive something from the central figure himself. It reflected, to my mind, Khullar Sahab's commitment to efficiency while simultaneously trying to help people as much as possible.
Our bunch of applications and representations was taken inside.
About half an hour later, the personal assistant returned with remarks and notings made by Khullar Sahab himself on the individual applications and representations.
When he showed me mine, I was wonderstruck.
I had written an entire page. Out of that whole page, the master bureaucrat had expertly identified and underlined just two points, marked them in the margins, and sent the matter onward to the Chief Secretary for expediting the process.
Just two or three words stood there as the entire positive reply to my full-page representation. His single phrase standing out as the title of justice and fair play!
After fighting for so many years, those few words appeared to me almost as if they were shining on the page.
They looked to me like the title of justice.
I was deeply impressed.
My Books Reach Him
I then requested the staff, “Can I meet the Hon'ble Chief Principal Secretary?”
They politely explained that it would not be possible because he had to leave.
So I asked, “Can you please forward my books for his consideration?”
They said, “Yes, we can take your books.”
I sent about a dozen of my books to the Hon'ble Chief Principal Secretary.
I knew him to be a person of vast and varied knowledge, ranging from hardcore science to poetry, and somebody fond of literature. I therefore hoped that my books might add some substance to my application and to my cause. They would perhaps tell him something about the person behind that one-page representation.
A couple of hours later, something happened that I had not expected.
I received a telephone call from his personal assistant.
I was told that Khullar Sahib would speak to me.
I was taken aback. I was nervous as well because everything had happened so suddenly.
Then I heard his voice.
There was authority in that voice, certainly, but it was not merely an authoritative voice. Beneath that authority there was a supporting kindness. If you are sensitive enough, you can feel these things. I could feel that this was a voice appropriately authoritative for the responsibility he carries, but its foundation consisted of kindness, understanding and sensibility.
That instantly began putting me at ease.
I had been nervous when the call began, but the manner in which he spoke changed that. He said only a few sentences, but he spoke so personally that it did not feel like some hard and stern message being passed down by somebody occupying one of the highest administrative positions in Haryana.
Then he complimented me on my books.
That meant a lot to me.
He said, “You can meet me sometime.”
Then the call ended.
Those few words gave me an enormous boost. Words of appreciation coming from such a senior figure in the Haryana administration instantly made me feel contented with life in that moment because, more than anything else, I felt respected.
I felt respected for the work I had been doing over the years. I felt that my books had received recognition from somebody occupying a position from which he has spent a lifetime evaluating people, policies, problems and ideas.
Seven and a Half Hours That Became a Learning Book
I thought it better not to lose any time.
Our interaction was still fresh in his memory. A person in his position has to attend to hundreds of issues and hundreds of different personalities every day. Had I been lazy and postponed meeting him to some other day, perhaps whatever positive impression my books had created might have become diluted amid the enormous number of things competing for his attention.
So I headed straight for his office in the Haryana Civil Secretariat.
Sitting outside his office itself became an education.
It was enlightening to watch how things function in the highest corridors of power. I waited for approximately seven and a half hours, yet strangely enough, it did not bother me.
How could one become bored when so many things were happening every moment?
The waiting area itself turned into a big learning book for me.
Highly influential people were arriving continuously. Meetings were taking place on completely different subjects. Administrative issues were being dealt with. Individual matters were being attended to. And among all of these were people like me, looking towards this office with hope.
I was awestruck by the sheer range of it.
Finally, late in the evening, at around seven, I got the opportunity to enter his office and meet him.
“Sandeep”
The way he took my name—“Sandeep”—was so full of kindness and consideration.
It felt as though he understood my position as somebody seeking justice for what I considered a well-deserved cause. There was something reassuring and caring in the way he spoke, as though he understood the wound itself; as though he could sense those clouds of despair that begin creeping into a person after fighting for a cause for a very long time.
Then something else surprised me.
He did not meet me in the manner in which I had imagined the Chief Principal Secretary would meet somebody.
I had expected him to occupy his high official chair behind the large table, with me sitting on a chair in front of him. Naturally, I began moving in that direction.
Instead, he directed me towards a more personal, private inner space.
I was quite surprised.
And there stood before me the poet, the philosopher and the bureaucrat—the man at the very heart of the Haryana administrative machinery—with such natural and majestic authority that his presence itself was sufficient to dispel much of my nervousness and inhibition.
Despite all the authority surrounding him, I found his presence remarkably kind.
When I look back at that moment now, I find something almost saintly in the figure I encountered. This is, of course, entirely my personal impression. I saw somebody surrounded by the glamour and machinery of enormous power, yet seemingly unaffected by it—as though he was simply playing the role assigned to him without becoming attached to the role itself.
I could detect absolutely no ego in his presence.
To me, he appeared to function with a remarkable detachment.
And every word he spoke to me was rewarding.
I felt honored that somebody with such an extraordinary administrative record was speaking so appreciatively about my books. He complimented me again.
I told him:
“Sir, these words of appreciation from the chief driving force of Haryana bureaucracy happen to be my biggest reward in life.”
Then he offered me some fruit.
Now, if such an esteemed personality asks you to have something, one should not say no! So I took a piece of apple and had a bite.
Then he said simply:
“Tell me now.”
From Listening to Action
I told him about my issue.
He immediately made a telephone call to his office and directed that the matter be dealt with as soon as possible.
But another small thing touched me equally deeply.
He knew that I had already been waiting for many hours. It was now late in the evening.
He asked me, “Where are you from?”
I told him that I came from a village in Sonipat.
Then, with what I experienced as very natural concern, he asked:
“Where will you stay today?”
That question has remained with me.
I told him that I would be going back. Had I told him that I was going by bus and had nowhere to stay, I am almost certain—from the impression I formed of him—that he would have directed somebody to make some arrangement for my overnight stay.
Such was the impression his kindness left upon me.
My Overall Impression of Khullar Sahab
The meeting left a very deep impression on me.
What struck me above everything else was the absence of any trace of hard edges, which power and authority easily breeds in we humans, in his graceful yet strong personality. Great power and authority can so easily enter a person's personality. It can gradually create distance between the person exercising authority and the ordinary person standing before him.
My impression was that power had not been allowed to make that dent in Khullar Sahab's personality.
It is not that he does not exercise power. Of course he does. His position requires enormous authority. He exercises power to a great effect that results in tremendous administrative efficiency. But the best thing is: He has mastered power; power has no mastery over him.
He appears to use power rather than allowing power to use him.
He uses it as an instrument of service—to bring effective change into the lives of people who approach him, to implement the policies that the government places before him, to make the administrative machinery function, and to put forward innovative ideas.
He uses power for a purpose, but, as a person, my impression was that he remains beyond that power.
That is perhaps the essence of my first personal experience of him.
Standing before him felt to me almost like standing before a saint-bureaucrat. One can feel such things if one is sensitive enough.
I found in him a remarkably deep and brilliant mind together with a caring, poetic and sensitive heart.
And that, in my experience, is a very rare combination.
A brief biography of Shri Rajesh Khullar Ji's professional career
Khullar Sahab's career is not merely a story of rising through the IAS hierarchy; it is a story of repeatedly moving between field administration, social reform, urban governance, national economic policy, international development finance, and finally the very center of state government.
A career built around problem-solving
Sh. Rajesh Khullar, IAS (Retd.), a 1988-batch Haryana-cadre officer, is currently Chief Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Haryana, Nayab Singh Saini. The Haryana government's formal order reappointed him to that position with effect from 17 October 2024. Even after retirement from the IAS on 31 August 2023, successive Haryana governments have considered his administrative experience valuable enough to retain him at the center of policymaking. As of April 2026, the CMO's allocation reportedly placed 18 major departments, including Finance, Home, Excise, Vigilance and Health, under his oversight, besides matters not allotted elsewhere.
That fact alone is revealing. A civil servant normally loses formal executive authority at superannuation. Khullar Sahab retired after approximately 35 years in the IAS, yet was appointed Chief Principal Secretary almost immediately afterward. His continued role under different political circumstances suggests that his principal institutional capital has been something more valuable and durable than mere official timespan of a bureaucrat: the ability to understand a problem quickly, work across departments and convert political objectives into implementable administrative programs.
The academic foundation
Khullar Sahab came to administration from science stream. He completed an M.Sc. in Physics from Panjab University in 1984, reportedly earning a gold medal, and later obtained a Master of Public Administration from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Tokyo. Institutional and biographical accounts also record executive study at Harvard Kennedy School.
He initially qualified for the Indian Railway Service, then Indian Police Service and subsequently entered the IAS in 1988.
There is an important lesson here for younger officers. His career demonstrates that specialization and general administration need not be opposites. Physics teaches analytical reasoning; public policy teaches institutions and incentives; field administration teaches human reality. Much of his later work appears to combine all three.
Early administration: social problems before they became fashionable causes
One of the most striking episodes in Khullar Sahab's achievements concerns the welfare of girls. Contemporary biographical material associated with his 2020 World Bank appointment credits him with designing measures in Haryana against amniocentesis-based sex selection and female foeticide, while promoting immunization and girls' education and discouraging early marriage through the Apni Beti, Apna Dhan program.
This matters historically because Haryana's adverse sex ratio was not a fashionable governance subject when such interventions began. The underlying administrative insight was ahead of its time: Do not treat a social evil only as a policing problem; change the economic and social incentives surrounding it.
The program linked the survival and future of a daughter with tangible state support. Whatever later governments and officers added to Haryana's girl-child campaigns, this early work is part of an administrative lineage that ultimately made the state's gender imbalance a central public-policy concern.
The lesson for young bureaucrats is significant: The best civil servant does not merely administer established priorities. Sometimes the civil servant has to recognize a problem before society has fully recognized it.
Education: Treating teachers as participants rather than merely employees
Khullar Sahab is credited with involving government primary-school teachers in writing new textbooks.
That appears modest beside billion-rupee projects, but administratively it represents a sophisticated idea: reforms work better when the people expected to implement them help design them.
Instead of assuming that expertise resides only at headquarters, this approach draws on classroom experience. It is an early example of what contemporary management would call co-creation.
Water conservation: Challenging politically easy agriculture
Khullar Sahab has also been credited with encouraging farmers to conserve groundwater by reducing dependence on water-intensive paddy cultivation.
For Haryana, this is not a trivial issue. Asking farmers to alter cropping choices involves economics, procurement, groundwater, political expectations and livelihood security simultaneously. The important aspect of this episode is therefore not simply the agricultural recommendation. It is the willingness to engage with a structural problem whose solution may not produce immediate applause.
A useful administrative principle follows:
Good governance sometimes means protecting citizens from a future crisis that has not yet become visible enough to frighten them.
Faridabad and Gurugram: The city as an administrative laboratory
Khullar Sahab's municipal years are among the richest parts of his career.
He served as Municipal Commissioner of Faridabad and later Gurugram, along with earlier district-level assignments including Sonipat and Rohtak. During his Faridabad tenure from July 2007 to June 2009, he received a Government of India Award of Excellence under JNNURM. The award was made for his contribution to green transport, sustainable urban mobility and innovative social-security umbrella.
The social-safety initiative attributed to him combined elements such as bank savings accounts, insurance, public conveniences and night shelters for poorer urban residents. The conceptual achievement is important: poverty was treated not as one deficiency but as a cluster of vulnerabilities.
That is remarkably modern public administration. A vulnerable family does not experience government department by department. It experiences income insecurity, illness, homelessness, sanitation problems and exclusion simultaneously. Khullar Sahab's approach was to build a protective umbrella rather than an isolated scheme.
The Aravali Biodiversity Park: One of the most visible physical legacies
Perhaps the most beautiful surviving example of his municipal administration is the Aravali Biodiversity Park in Gurugram.
The area was degraded land vulnerable to dumping, encroachment and development pressure. Citizen group IAmGurgaon approached Municipal Commissioner Rajesh Khullar Ji around 2009 with the idea of restoring it. Accounts of the park's creation record that Khullar Sahab embraced the proposal and enabled the municipal corporation to work with civil society. What eventually emerged was a restored native Aravalli ecosystem spread over hundreds of acres.
The Indian Express credits him with protecting approximately 250 acres from encroachment and land-mafia pressure, while older Gurugram reporting credits him with helping ensure that the biodiversity park survived and flourished.
The park later acquired recognition far beyond the tenure of the officer who helped initiate it. Its story provides one of the finest lessons from Khullar Sahab's career:
A bureaucrat's greatest project may be something that matures long after he has been transferred.
There was no need for government to do everything itself. Khullar Sahab's role was to open institutional space for citizens who possessed imagination, commitment and expertise.
That partnership model—administration supplying legitimacy and infrastructure, citizens contributing knowledge and stewardship—is exceptionally valuable for future officers.
E-governance before "Digital Governance" became a slogan
During his Gurugram municipal tenure, Khullar Sahab is credited with starting or strengthening the municipal website, introducing e-tendering, forming citizen monitoring groups and using technology to make administration more transparent.
This was important because municipal procurement has traditionally been one of the areas most vulnerable to opacity, delay and discretionary interference.
E-tendering appears technically mundane today. In the context of the time, it represented a philosophical change: Replace personal discretion with traceable process wherever technology makes that possible.
This theme followed Khullar Sahab into higher government and became a recurring feature of Haryana's later digital-governance architecture.
Animal welfare combined with municipal administration
Khullar Sahab is credited with creating Kamdhenudham and Nandhidham cattle shelters at Carterpuri and taking measures to address the stray-cattle problem in Faridabad and Gurugram.
This reveals another recurring trait: Dealing with apparently mundane urban problems instead of considering them beneath senior administration.
Roads, cattle, sanitation, night shelters, parks, tenders and public toilets may lack the prestige of macroeconomic policy—but these are precisely the things through which ordinary citizens experience government.
From municipality to India's Ministry of Finance
Khullar Sahab's next major leap demonstrates the breadth of his administrative range.
In February 2011 he became Joint Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Herein he was closely involvement with public-private partnerships and national infrastructure policy.
He is credited with helping design the structure of India's Infrastructure Debt Funds, an important financing mechanism intended to channel long-term capital into infrastructure.
Think about the range involved.
The same officer who had been dealing with garbage, cattle, urban forests and municipal services was now dealing with international finance, infrastructure capital and sovereign development cooperation.
That adaptability may be one of the strongest lessons of his career. A good generalist does not know everything. A good generalist knows how to learn a new field quickly enough to make sound decisions with specialists.
Negotiating international development finance
During his Department of Economic Affairs tenure, Khullar Sahab was associated with several major bilateral financing arrangements.
An Indian Express profile records that in June 2013 he signed an umbrella agreement with Germany covering approximately $723 million of financial and technical cooperation in energy, environment and natural-resource management. It also records his role in Japanese development-finance agreements, including infrastructure and energy projects.
In March 2014, the India-Japan ODA package he was associated with involved more than ¥250 billion, encompassing Delhi Metro expansion and renewable-energy projects; contemporary reporting described it as exceptionally large by Japanese ODA signing standards.
Here is another lesson for civil servants: A file signed in Delhi can ultimately become a metro line, hospital, road, renewable-energy plant or water system used by millions of people.
Finance is not separate from public service. Properly understood, finance is the mechanism by which public intentions acquire physical form.
At the center of Haryana government
Khullar Sahab returned to Haryana and became Principal Secretary to Chief Minister Manohar Lal in November 2015, remaining in the position for nearly five years before moving to the World Bank. He also held major responsibilities including HSIIDC and at one stage the state Home Department.
This period coincided with Haryana's push toward digitalization and centralized governance systems.
It would be inaccurate to attribute every Haryana initiative during those years personally to one officer; large programs are collective governmental products. But Khullar Sahab occupied the administrative nerve center through which many such initiatives passed, and multiple profiles explicitly associate him with Haryana's push towards digital governance, transparent process and technology-enabled administration. He was the chief driving force of these measures.
Systems introduced or expanded during the wider period included digital procurement, citizen-service platforms, family-linked welfare databases, digitized land and property records and increasingly data-driven delivery of government benefits. Khullar Sahab was present at the 2019 launch of the Parivar Pehchan Patra architecture, conceived as a family-level database through which government welfare programs could be targeted.
The governing idea behind such systems is worth studying even apart from any individual technology: The citizen should not have to repeatedly prove his existence to every department of the same government.
Government data, when lawfully and responsibly integrated, can make the state come to the eligible beneficiary rather than requiring the beneficiary to keep chasing the state.
The World Bank: From Haryana administration to global development
In September 2020, the Government of India appointed Khullar Sahab as Executive Director at the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C.
He represented a constituency including India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka, and in the Global Environment Facility also represented Nepal and Maldives.
This was not a ceremonial diplomatic posting. Executive Directors sit on the World Bank Group's governing boards and participate in decisions involving development finance across the world.
Khullar Sahab subsequently chaired the World Bank Group's Committee on Development Effectiveness (CODE). Official World Bank board calendars confirm him chairing CODE proceedings.
That committee is particularly relevant to his administrative philosophy because its central question is essentially: Are development programs actually producing the results for which money was spent?
That is the right question not only for the World Bank but for every district magistrate, secretary and public official.
Global environmental finance
Khullar Sahab also served as India's member on the Global Environment Facility Council. Official GEF documentation lists him as representing the constituency of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
During the GEF-8 replenishment process, 29 donor countries pledged approximately $5.25 billion, then the largest replenishment in GEF history, for work relating to biodiversity, climate change, pollution and environmental protection. The GEF's own announcement quoted Khullar Sahab welcoming the replenishment and emphasizing innovation and blended public-private finance.
This creates an extraordinary symmetry in his career.
As a municipal commissioner he helped protect an urban Aravalli landscape.
A decade later he was participating in decisions concerning billions of dollars for planetary biodiversity and climate protection.
The scale changed. The principle did not.
The pandemic and development
Khullar Sahab's World Bank tenure coincided with one of the most disruptive periods in modern development history—the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a 2022 discussion about the Bank's work, he described major World Bank interventions involving social protection, cash and food transfers, healthcare, vaccination and climate-development integration. The Bank had committed billions toward vaccine procurement and distribution in developing countries.
Again, the important lesson for future administrators is that crises punish rigid institutions. The officer who survives intellectually is the officer who can shift from normal procedure to emergency problem-solving without abandoning accountability.
Returning to Haryana after the World Bank
Khullar Sahab was repatriated to Haryana in 2023. Before his retirement that August he was entrusted with senior responsibilities including Revenue and Disaster Management, School Education and Information/Public Relations.
He retired on 31 August 2023.
On 1 September he was appointed Chief Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister.
That sequence may be one of the strongest endorsements a career bureaucrat can receive: Retirement ended his membership of the service, but not the government's demand for his service.
Following the formation of the new Nayab Singh Saini government in 2024, an official Haryana order once again appointed him Chief Principal Secretary.
By late 2024 he was overseeing a very broad set of departments from the CMO, and by April 2026 the latest allocation reported 18 key departments under him.
Back to the street: Gurugram, 2025
One episode from 2025 captures Khullar Sahab's administrative style particularly well.
Faced with serious sanitation, waterlogging and infrastructure problems in Gurugram, the state government sent the Chief Principal Secretary not merely to hold a ceremonial review but to camp in the city for several days.
Khullar Sahab convened approximately 120 officials from MCG, GMDA, HSVP, DHBVN and the district administration in a marathon multi-hour meeting, working across departmental boundaries on sanitation, roads, electricity, garbage and waterlogging.
This episode is almost a return to the beginning of his career.
After the Ministry of Finance, after the World Bank, after international environmental finance and after decades in government, the work still comes down to:
a broken road;
a garbage pile;
a flooded street;
an unsafe electric installation;
and a citizen who wants someone in government to take responsibility.
That may be the most important lesson of all.
What can a younger civil servant learn from Khullar Sahab?
If I had to distil his career into principles for a young IAS, IPS, HCS or any person entering public service, I would retain these ten ideas:
1. Become a problem-solver, not merely a rule-processor. Rules are essential, but government exists because real life produces problems that do not arrive neatly arranged by department.
2. Never regard small civic problems as beneath you. A World Bank board member who can still concern himself with garbage, cattle, drainage and roads understands what administration is ultimately for.
3. Use technology to reduce discretion, delay and repeated citizen effort. E-tendering and digital governance are valuable not because computers are modern, but because transparent systems can make public power more accountable.
4. Bring citizens inside governance. The Aravali Biodiversity Park illustrates what becomes possible when government does not treat civil society as an adversary.
5. Think beyond your tenure. Plant the institutional tree even when somebody else will sit under its shade.
6. Learn continuously. Physics, public administration, municipal governance, infrastructure finance, international development and environmental policy appear extraordinarily different. A career can encompass all of them if the officer remains intellectually mobile.
7. Measure outcomes, not activity. A thousand files disposed of mean little if the underlying public problem remains. Khullar Sahab's later chairmanship of the World Bank's Committee on Development Effectiveness embodies this distinction.
8. Integrate rather than fragment. The social-security umbrella, multi-department urban reviews and family-linked service architecture all reflect the same instinct: citizens experience problems holistically, so government must learn to coordinate horizontally.
9. Have the courage to work on difficult long-term issues. Groundwater depletion, female foeticide, urban ecological protection and infrastructure financing are all problems whose results emerge slowly.
10. Make competence your lasting influence. Posts disappear. Governments change. Officers retire. The most durable form of administrative power is to become the person repeatedly trusted with difficult assignments because people believe you can deliver.
The deeper significance of his career
There is a temptation when writing about a highly placed civil servant to measure achievement by proximity to power. That would miss the more interesting story in Khullar Sahab's case.
His career can instead be read as a journey through different scales of public service.
At one scale: a girl child threatened before birth.
At another: a poor urban family needing insurance and shelter.
At another: an abandoned piece of Aravalli land.
Then a whole municipality.
Then the financing of national infrastructure.
Then Haryana Chief Minister's Office.
Then six South Asian nations around a World Bank board table.
Then global climate and biodiversity finance.
And eventually, once again, a dirty street in Gurugram requiring somebody to get 120 officers into one room and make the machinery move.
That arc contains a powerful definition of civil service: The scale of the problem may change; the obligation to solve it does not.
Khullar Sahab's career therefore offers young administrators something more useful than a conventional success story. It shows that intellectual ability must eventually become administrative action; administrative authority must eventually become public benefit; and a truly successful civil servant should leave behind systems, institutions, landscapes and practices that continue functioning after his name has disappeared from the file.
