UTTAR PRADESH: What’s common among BlockChain technology, women empowerment and smart policing? Well, if one is referring to Uttar Pradesh, it’s an IPS officer who thinks out of the box. Ashish Tiwari, an officer of the 2012 batch, brings his global exposure to improvise his work as the police chief of various districts of the state.
While he launched the ‘Police Complaint on Block Chain’ Web portal to help the public register all types of complaints in Firozabad, Tiwari also helped curate a unique ‘green’ brigade of women in the Naxal-affected district of Mirzapur when he was the police chief there.
Another initiative to his name is the development of software that keeps tabs on duties assigned to cops and tracks their movements besides streamlining the roster management of the force. He also ‘adopts’ villages and works on improving the standards of schools in the districts he is posted in to ensure quality education along with recreational activities for children. Tiwari adopted a school and refurbished it. It now resembles a bright yellow school bus.
“It was an attempt to draw more children towards the school,” he says. If policing has won him recognition in the department, he has also earned several accolades and awards for his unique initiatives. Born and brought up in Itarsi, MP, Tiwari is the son of a railway section engineer. An IIT-Kharagpur alumni, he was selected by the famous global financial services firm, Lehman Brothers. He worked as an investment banker in London for a year, then moved to Japan’s Nomura Bank in 2008.
After two years, Ashish decided to leave his job, which would give him a seven-digit salary, and returned to India. His next challenge was the UPSE. In 2011, he was selected for Indian Revenue Services with an all-India rank of 330. Tiwari, however, was not satisfied. Next year, a jump of 111 positions got him through to the Indian Police Service. He has used his power to improve the lives of people around him through his innovative ways. In 2017, while helming Mirzapur as the district police chief, he introduced his ‘green’ brigade of women in the Naxal-hit districts adjoining Varanasi.
Donning a green saree as their uniform and armed with a whistle, the members, spread across ten villages, were fighting domestic abuse and social evils like gambling and liquor addiction while keeping a vigilant eye on Naxal activities. Given their zeal, several civil society organisations trained women in karate and martial arts. They also held skill-training workshops in stitching and cooking to help the women become
self-reliant.
“If villages have to embark on the path of progress, it is the women we need to empower first. Keeping this philosophy in mind, I started the green group. While some had husbands who worked as Naxalites, several had lost their husbands in Naxal conflicts,” quips the officer.
In Mirzapur itself, Tiwari developed software that kept a tab on duties assigned to cops and tracked their movements. The software ensured that all police constables were assigned duties fairly, and without discrimination and also helped track their movement and location while patrolling. In Firozabad, as SSP, Tiwari launched a ‘Police Complaint on BlockChain’ Web portal to help the public register all types of complaints to the police. This was a never-before initiative in the state.
He was the SSP of Ayodhya in November 2019 when the SC pronounced the verdict in Ram Janmabhoomi case. His innovative strategies in areas of community policing helped him keep the temple town peaceful free incidents then.