Prajakta Verma takes charge as additional municipal commissioner at MCGM

MUMBAI: Prajakta Verma has moved into one of Mumbai’s more demanding civic posts, taking over as additional municipal commissioner, city and health, at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). The brief is unglamorous but vital: solid waste management, sanitation, urban planning and the sort of citizen centric issues that decide whether a city actually works, with a particular focus on health and education.

Verma is no stranger to hard postings. Her IAS career, now running past two decades, has taken her from CEO of Ahmednagar district and collector of Dhule to director general of information and public relations, then joint secretary with the state government. A stint as deputy director general, shipping, saw her help shape legislative frameworks for India’s international shipping commitments, hardly a small task. She went on to head the investigation wing of the sales tax department, where cross agency data sharing with the registration department and RTO helped unearth large scale evasion in the cigarettes and cold drinks trade, proof that dogged administrative work can still deliver results the private sector would envy.

From there, she served as joint managing director at CIDCO, excise commissioner, secretary for Marathi Bhasha, and divisional commissioner of Nagpur, before spending four years and three months as joint secretary in the Union Ministry of Textiles in Delhi. That Delhi stint, spanning much of the last presidential term, will have given her a ringside view of central policymaking before returning to the coalface of city administration.

Verma has been vocal about wanting to engage widely in her new role, name checking start-ups, think tanks and young minds among those she hopes will partner with her. For a city perennially wrestling with garbage collection and civic grievances, that outreach instinct, backed by two decades of governance experience across sub district, district, state and central levels, will be watched closely. Mumbai’s citizens, for their part, will judge her less on outreach and more on whether the bins get emptied on time.