Interview with Mr. Adarsh Singh

Excise Commissioner, Government of Uttar Pradesh

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Mr. Adarsh Singh, IAS, is currently serving as the Excise Commissioner, Government of Uttar Pradesh. Over an almost two decade long career, he has held a range of key administrative positions, including Divisional Commissioner, Jhansi; District Magistrate and Collector in Barabanki, Pratapgarh, Kannauj, and Chitrakoot; and Special Secretary in the Chief Minister’s Office as well as in the Departments of Sugar Industries and Cane Development, Transport, and Revenue. He has also led the National Rural Livelihoods Mission as its Director, steering large-scale initiatives on rural development and women’s economic empowerment.

A medical graduate (MBBS) by training, Mr. Singh began his civil service career in the Tripura cadre, where he served as Officer on Special Duty and Sub-Divisional Magistrate, before moving to Uttar Pradesh.

In this conversation with The Policy Edge team, Mr. Singh reflects on ethical and institutional choices that define governance, the balance between enforcement and empathy, and the reforms needed to align administrative structures with citizens’ everyday realities.

You trained as a doctor before choosing a life in administration. What prompted that shift, and how did your early administrative years test it?

Medicine teaches patience – long-term commitment before impact shows. The civil services offered a broader canvas: a chance to shape systems early on.

My first posting, in Tripura was another world. The language barrier was immediate – Kokborok and Bengali dominated – and communication itself became an administrative skill. I learned that listening isn’t passive; it is how trust begins to form. In regions where institutions had been weakened by insurgency, and where both the state and the security forces were viewed with caution, distrust was not an obstacle but a mirror – a reminder that legitimacy must be earned, not assumed. Every routine act of governance became a negotiation of understanding.

Medicine had trained me to diagnose before intervening. In governance, that meant evidence-based decisions, but from individual to institutional healing. In both, the hardest lesson is judgment: knowing when to act and when to wait. The service rewards not just brilliance, but also calmness, consistency, and resilience..

As in Tripura, working in Chitrakoot placed you at the intersection of law, livelihood, and local governance. How do you reconcile the state’s regulatory role with the need to trust communities governed by their own informal norms?

A single incident my seniors described from their time in Dhalai captured the tension I first came to understand in Tripura. One of them had once offered to buy all the bananas a tribal vendor had, and the vendor refused. “If I sell you all of it, what will I sell for the rest of the day?” he had asked.

That moment captured the essence of life there. Survival ran on rhythm, not accumulation. Prosperity meant continuity, not surplus. For a young officer trained in targets and metrics, it was a process of unlearning. Rationality revealed itself as highly contextual – in fragile ecosystems, predictability often outweighs profit.

Implementing the Forest Rights Act (2006) later deepened that lesson. Administratively, it was among the most complex laws to operationalise. On paper it promised empowerment; on the ground it required reconciling claims across communities, the forest department, and conservation law. Each application became a negotiation between legality and livelihood. You had to read the law not as text, but as trust.

In Chitrakoot, the contrast was stark. Here, resources flowed but delivery faltered. The real tension lay between the presence of schemes and the absence of systems. Development wasn’t limited by funds but by the architecture of coordination – how departments listened to each other, how frontline workers were supported, and how communities were involved beyond consultation. You realise that development isn’t arithmetic; it’s the geometry of relationships – between institutions and citizens, and between trust and accountability.

You have overseen elections in constituencies where every administrative action is read as political intent. How do you practise neutrality in an environment where enforcing the law can itself be seen as taking sides?

As District Election Officer in Pratapgarh, I realised that elections test not just logistics but integrity. You are balancing law, local pressures, and public expectations in real time.

There was an instance where villagers blocked opponents from canvassing; and another where a presiding officer “helped” a voter beyond what rules allowed. In such cases, neutrality is not passive; it’s an active, visible stance. I had to personally remove a campaign banner that violated the model code, not because of politics but because a small breach legitimises a larger one. Once you look away from one infraction, you have effectively licensed ten more. The challenge isn’t enforcing rules – it’s doing so without appearing partisan. Every correction is also a signal, and every silence a verdict.

Conducting elections taught me that the daily demonstration of fairness is no less important than following law.

You moved to the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) at a very interesting time – social media’s speed was reshaping the rhythm of governance, and you were at the helm of media monitoring. What happens to deliberation when every decision is instantly public?

Working in the CMO was like being at the nerve centre of a constantly refreshing feedback loop. My role spanned district coordination, grievance redressal, and media monitoring, and I saw how technology had compressed administrative time. What once took a week to verify could become a headline within an hour. This compression created a new kind of tension – between accuracy and immediacy. A small lapse could become national news before facts were even known.

In my next posting as District Magistrate, Barabanki, I had a subtle experience. A few YouTubers circulated fake videos about a school’s condition. The pressure wasn’t just to act fast, but to act publicly. I was even invited to play the “hero” by joining their spectacle – which I refused. Instead, we documented the facts, wrote to the platform owners, and let the record speak.

Action followed, but the episode revealed how governance now operates in a space where perception outruns proof. You are not only managing administration, but also a narrative. Social media has become the new field inspection – except the crowd is infinite. The discipline required today is not procedural but psychological: staying calm when the noise is instant and the consequences global.

While you were District Magistrate of Barabanki, it was also the most turbulent months of COVID. How did you lead through the crisis where empathy is as critical as efficiency, and where your medical and administrative instincts converged?

COVID revealed governance at its barest – running on fear, fatigue, and faith. Our priority was to keep the chain of trust intact – between the administration, citizens, and frontline staff. If citizens didn’t trust the administration, they wouldn’t report symptoms. If staff didn’t trust leadership, they wouldn’t stay motivated. Every order we issued – from oxygen allocation to movement passes – had to be transparent and humane.

We set up real-time dashboards for oxygen flow, mobilised community kitchens, and coordinated with industries for cylinders. Barabanki recorded one of the region’s better recovery rates, but what stayed with me are the people – nurses working double shifts, volunteers returning after losing family.

My medical training made it deeply personal. I knew what fatigue looked like behind a mask, what uncertainty did to morale. That empathy shaped proportion – not every failure was negligence, not every success a control. Crises reveal that institutions don’t run on orders alone; they run on trust – and shared victories and exhaustion.

You now lead Uttar Pradesh’s Excise Department, which has undergone major transformation under your watch. What does it take to modernise a high-revenue legacy department, and how do such institutional shifts come about?

The Excise Department is one of the state’s oldest and most revenue-heavy institutions. Manual record-keeping was the norm, which meant limited transparency, and therefore, discretionary approvals. When I took charge, the challenge was dual: to facelift the Department culturally and step up its finances to support the state’s long term vision, including the 2047 target.

We digitised production and distribution tracking, made licensing fully transparent, and aligned policy to market data instead of political cycles. Revenues crossed ₹52,500 crore in FY 2025, up 15 per cent, but the deeper shift was confidence. Traders and investors began to see regulation not as harassment but as partnership.

Transparency and empowerment grow together, whatever the scale.

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