Command in Practice
Three tiers, three different disciplines
The commands in this career are not variations on one job. They demand genuinely different things, and the progression between them is the substance of the leadership record.
Direct command. As Superintendent of Police in Akola and as Deputy Commissioner of Police for Zone IX in Mumbai, the officer is the decision. Subordinates execute; the outcome is traceable to the person holding the charge.
Supervision. As Inspector General of Police for the Nashik Range, the officer commands commanders. Nothing is executed personally. The work becomes setting standards, allocating resources, and judging the performance of Superintendents of Police who hold their own districts. It is a different skill, and officers who are strong at the first are not automatically strong at the second.
Institutional leadership. As Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order), as Additional Director General of the Anti-Corruption Bureau, and now as Commissioner of Police, the work is largely about the organisation itself: its structure, its sanctioned strength, its buildings, its specialist units, its standing with the public and with other arms of government. The two-year record at Pimpri-Chinchwad reads accordingly — four police stations opened, a cyber station commissioned, land secured, units created, a hospital established.
Between December 2022 and December 2024 the commissionerate grew from seventeen police stations, four divisions and two zones to twenty-five police stations, eight divisions and four zones.
Structural figures reported by The Free Press Journal, 4 April 2026; tenure record reported by Punekar News and Indian Masterminds, 17 December 2024.
