A Career in Motion
Statement
Responsibility is measured by what it enables.
An editorial statement written for this website. It is not a quotation from Vinoy Kumar Choubey.
Introduction
Vinoy Kumar Choubey is an officer of the Indian Police Service, appointed to the 1995 batch and allotted the Maharashtra cadre. Since 14 December 2022 he has served as Commissioner of Police, Pimpri-Chinchwad — the industrial and information-technology conurbation adjoining Pune, and one of Maharashtra’s most rapidly expanding urban jurisdictions. He is the fifth officer to hold that command since the commissionerate was created on 15 August 2018, and the first to complete a full two-year tenure in the post.
He came to the service by an unusual route. Choubey holds both a B.Tech and an M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and the engineering habit of mind — systems, measurement, instrumentation — has stayed visible in the way he has approached policing. Reporting on his career has consistently identified technology adoption and surveillance capability as a defining interest.
The career itself has been deliberately broad. He has held district charge as Superintendent of Police in Akola; metropolitan field command as Deputy Commissioner of Police for Zone IX in Mumbai, covering the belt from Bandra to Andheri; a long civil-administrative posting as Regional Passport Officer, Mumbai; and a diplomatic deputation to the Embassy of India in the Netherlands, where he headed The Gandhi Centre, the embassy’s cultural wing. He has commanded the Economic Offences Wing as Joint Commissioner of Police, led the Nashik Range as Inspector General of Police, and served as Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) for Mumbai — the post responsible for the city’s public order during a period that included general and state elections, the Article 370 announcements, the Ram Janmabhoomi judgment, the CAA/NRC and Maratha reservation agitations, and the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2020 he was appointed Additional Director General of Police, Anti-Corruption Bureau, Maharashtra.
That range — district, metropolis, economic crime, range command, foreign posting, anti-corruption, and now a commissionerate of his own — is the substance of this website. What follows sets out the documented record: the postings, the responsibilities they carried, the initiatives that are on the public record, and the recognition that has followed.
Four Movements
An engineer before he was a police officer. Two degrees from IIT Kanpur, then selection to the Indian Police Service in 1995 and allotment to Maharashtra — a cadre that would give him a district, a metropolis, a range and a commissionerate in turn. The formative years established the pattern: field responsibility first, specialisation afterwards.
Superintendent of Police, Akola. Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone IX, Mumbai. Regional Passport Officer, Mumbai. The Gandhi Centre at the Embassy of India in the Netherlands. Joint Commissioner of Police, Economic Offences Wing. Inspector General of Police, Nashik Range. Each posting sat in a different institution with a different mandate, and each is documented on the public record.
As Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) he held Mumbai’s public order through elections, national announcements, judgments and agitations, and then through the arrival of the pandemic. As Additional Director General of the Anti-Corruption Bureau he led the state agency charged with investigating public servants. Both are posts defined by decisions that cannot be deferred.
At Pimpri-Chinchwad the commissionerate has grown from seventeen police stations, four divisions and two zones to twenty-five police stations, eight divisions and four zones. A cyber police station, an Anti-Narcotics Cell and a dog squad were established; land was secured for a permanent commissionerate headquarters; and the force opened new channels — virtual town halls, weekly open sessions — through which citizens reach it directly.
The Command
The Pimpri-Chinchwad Police Commissionerate was constituted on 15 August 2018, carved out of the Pune Rural jurisdiction to serve a city that had outgrown the policing arrangement it inherited. Its remit reaches past the municipal boundary into the industrial estates at Chakan and Talegaon Dabhade, and it covers the Hinjawadi information-technology corridor — a working population that arrives and leaves each day in numbers the resident figures do not capture.
It is, in other words, a jurisdiction defined by movement: manufacturing shifts, IT commuting, migration, construction, and the crime patterns that follow each of them. Reporting places the area under the commissionerate at roughly 115 square kilometres. The force has operated from a municipal school building on rent while a permanent headquarters is built.
At a Glance
Service
Indian Police Service
1995 batch, Maharashtra cadre.
Experience
District to metropolis
Akola, Mumbai, Nashik Range, the Netherlands, Pimpri-Chinchwad.
Responsibility
Commissioner of Police
Pimpri-Chinchwad, since 14 December 2022.
Leadership
17 → 25 police stations
Divisions grew from four to eight, zones from two to four.
Recognition
President’s Police Medal
For Distinguished Service, announced Independence Day 2023.
Figures as reported by Punekar News and Indian Masterminds, 17 December 2024, and The Free Press Journal, 4 April 2026. Medal announcement reported by Prasar Bharati (newsonair.gov.in), 14 August 2023.