Interview with Mr. G. V. Venugopala Sarma

Former Member-Secretary, National Disaster Management Authority

Mr. G. V. Venugopala Sarma served at the level of Secretary in Government of India as Member-Secretary of the National Disaster Management Authority. Over an administrative career spanning more than three decades across state and central governments, he held senior responsibilities in land revenue, internal security–related administration, and large-scale e-governance reforms, including visa systems.

Earlier, he held key field postings as District Collector in Odisha and served in Nagaland, gaining firsthand experience in conflict management, poverty alleviation, decentralised planning, and tribal welfare.

Since retirement, Mr. Sarma has remained engaged with public policy through research and advisory work, with a focus on disaster management, land governance, and institutional reform. A graduate in Physics from IIT Madras, Mr. Sarma has worked at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research before joining the IAS.

In this conversation with The Policy Edge, he reflects on institutional learning, implementation challenges, and governance trade-offs across district administration, state and central government, and policy design..

Your first major field posting was in Nagaland, during a period marked by insurgency and deep social mistrust. What did that experience teach you about governing in politically and culturally sensitive regions?

Nagaland taught me that in conflict-affected regions, legitimacy is the starting point of governance. I had joined soon after the Merapani conflict between Nagaland and Assam police, when sentiments were raw and trust in institutions was extremely fragile. The primary challenge was not normal administrative tasks, but a deep sense of alienation – a feeling that the Indian state was distant or even hostile.

In such contexts, authority alone carries little weight. What matters is reassurance, pursuance, and cultural sensitivity. I made it a point to interact informally, learn Nagamese, and participate in community spaces. These gestures were small but significant. They helped reduce the emotional distance between the state and the people. Institutions like the Assam Rifles also played a constructive role by organising medical camps and educational outreach, reinforcing the idea that the state could be protective rather than coercive.

The broader lesson was that in regions shaped by historical grievance, governance is fundamentally about trust. Law and order are necessary, but without a connection, administrative action remains brittle and easily contested.

In contrast, your work in districts like Nayagarh and Jharsuguda in Odisha involved chronic poverty rather than political alienation. How different was the administrative challenge there?

The challenge in western Odisha was structural deprivation – acute poverty, migration, and highly unequal land ownership. Funds for poverty reduction programmes were not a constraint. Programmes such as the Long Term Action Plan for Kalahandi–Bolangir–Koraput (KBK) region, Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, and the Employment Assurance Scheme were well-funded and closely monitored, even at the highest levels of government. The real constraints lay in human capacity and long-term sustainability.

Employment programmes were useful for providing temporary relief, but they could not, by themselves, break poverty cycles. Asset-based interventions like Integrated Rural Development Programme that linked households to credit and productive assets, proved more durable, though even these depended on careful follow-through. For example, veterinary support for livestock, access to markets, and training to enhance the ability of poor households to maintain what they received.

In retrospect, agriculture itself was a binding constraint. Irrigation often attracted farmers toward paddy cultivation, with more and more input costs and consequent indebtedness. Today, greater awareness regarding millets, rain-fed agriculture, and low-input farming has widened policy possibilities. Development learning is cumulative; each phase builds on the successes and blind spots of the previous one.

You have spoken in detail about district-level institutions like the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) and Panchayats. What does decentralised planning actually look like in practice, beyond the theory?

Decentralisation on the ground is rarely neat. Institutions like the DRDA, chaired by the district collector, are spaces of negotiation, though by and large, I received very high degree of support from the elected representatives. Odisha had regular Panchayat elections, and Zilla Parishad meetings were often vocal, contested, and politically charged. Different priorities, interests, and interpretations of “development” surfaced openly.

While programmes often had broad acceptance, sustainability was a matter of concern. Decisions about asset creation, beneficiary selection, and local priorities required continuous dialogue. Here, the administrator’s role became one of mediation – translating policy intent into locally acceptable action while keeping longer-term objectives in view.

Excluding these voices in the name of efficiency would have produced outcomes that were faster, but far weaker in terms of public acceptance.

Land acquisition and displacement have been a core area of your work in Odisha and later. These issues keep recurring as flashpoints in India’s development story. From your experience, why does this issue remain so difficult to resolve?

Land is not merely an economic asset; it is security, identity, and dignity. This makes forcible land acquisition inherently contentious. In many parts of Odisha, especially where industrial or infrastructure projects required land acquisition, ownership patterns were highly skewed and land records were outdated. When land was acquired, compensation was often calculated in the name of a single recorded owner, even though the land had, in practice, been divided among many descendants over generations but the records were not updated. As a result, compensation that appeared adequate on paper translated into very small shares for actual users, creating resentment and a sense of injustice, even when procedures were formally followed.

At the heart of the issue lies the principle of ‘eminent domain’ – the state’s legal power to acquire private property for public purpose. The Kalinganagar incident of 2006 – where police firing during protests against land acquisition for an industrial project in Odisha led to the deaths of 13l tribal villagers – was a tragic illustration of what happens when consultation fails and trust collapses.

There have been important correctives since then. The Supreme Court’s Niyamgiri judgment, which affirmed the primacy of Gram Sabha consent, along with land record digitisation, has shifted the balance toward greater transparency and participation. Yet the core challenge persists: sustainable development requires negotiation, with communities treated as participants rather than as subjects.

You also emphasised the importance of common property resources – grazing lands, water bodies, forests – which rarely receive public attention. Why are these so critical to rural governance?

Common property resources are often invisible in policy debates, yet they are vital for the survival of the poorest households, especially where land ownership is highly unequal. Grazing lands, water tanks, riverbeds, and forest commons provide livelihoods, food security, and ecological stability. For landless families, these commons are often the only accessible assets.

These resources face constant pressure – from encroachment, mining, infrastructure projects, and even well-intentioned development works. Revenue officials at the local level are under persistent pressure to convert commons for individual or commercial use, often pushed by more powerful interests within villages.

Programmes such as MGNREGA showed that the state can protect and regenerate commons through plantation, water conservation, and soil conservation work, strengthening both livelihoods and climate resilience. Protecting common property resources ultimately requires community support, transparent land records, decentralised governance and administrative resolve. Without this, the poorest lose their last line of economic security.

In your later roles, particularly in disaster management and e-governance, you worked at a much larger institutional scale. What should young administrators understand about governance beyond the district level today?

Governance today extends well beyond district boundaries and single departments. During the 1999 Odisha super cyclone, I was involved in coordinating airport logistics for relief material – receiving, accounting, and dispatching supplies while Indian Air Force helicopters operated continuously to carry relief material to the affected. That experience underscored the limits of ad-hoc response and the need for institutional preparedness.

In response, Odisha built dedicated disaster institutions even before national frameworks were in place. Over time, disaster management shifted from relief to preparedness and mitigation – a transition that required sustained financing, engineering capacity, and community participation. Disaster Management Act helped institutionalise this shift. Recommendations of the 15th Finance Commission created separate windows for capacity building and preparedness, mitigation including prevention, response and relief, and recovery and reconstruction. There is a need to enhance the pace of utilisation of these funds and to facilitate social audits.

Similarly, e-governance reforms – whether in land registration or visa systems – mattered not for digitisation itself, but for redesigning systems to reduce discretion, limit middlemen, enhance security, and improve transparency and accountability.

For those entering public service today, the message is clear: governance increasingly requires collaboration across institutions including civil society and appropriate technology. Many of India’s hardest social problems can be solved by bringing all stakeholders together and by an accountable governance system.

Views are personal.