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Contents: Foreword. Preface. 1. Firmly Grounded Early Life, Education and Training. 2. First Cut in Revenue, Regulatory, Development Administration. 3. Decisive District Administration: Ganjam. 4. Desk Jobs in the Secretariat and Foreign Training. 5. Deep Plough: Agriculture and Food Production. 6. A Bit of Everything. 7. Central Sojourn: Handling Home Affairs and AYUSH. 8. Taxing Life: Administration of Commercial Taxes in Odisha. 9. Equity and Equality:  ST and SC and OBC and Minorities Welfare. 10.  Multiple Hats: Cooperation, Excise and Rural Development. 11.  Highest Office: Cabinet Secretariat and its functioning. 12.  Saving Precious Lives: Revenue and Disaster Management. 13.  KBK Districts: Superior Endowments, Conspicuous Deficits. 14.  The Past Gone, Seizing Today: Closure of Innings.

The “Highlander's Plainspeak:  an Administrative Rede” is a unique narrative. Structured over important posts held by author over a period of thirty three years of active service in Indian Administration, it recounts personal novel experiences while critically analysing reformative and developmental interventions. It spans wide-ranging fields of administration. From policy-making to implementation of schemes, taxation and planned spending, it forays into the unexpected heavy fire-fighting during natural disasters and emergencies, besides challenging brushes with polity and judiciary. It can be useful not only for the  budding aspirants and administrators but also to those having academic interest in nuances and caveats, potential and paradoxes of the Indian administrative system in all its facets. The book shows how the system rewards and motivates but also punishes and bruises, sometimes without rhyme or reason. Misunderstandings with seniors, contemporaries and friends can be common, and at times vicious. The narratives reveal how an administrator can exercise functional leverage through specific and broad-based interventions  at every rung of hierarchy, even  while holding posts type-cast as administratively insignificant. The book reflects the die-hard spirit of an emotionally-detached administrator, who turned his assignments into the most productive ones for the public at large.