Divya Mittal voluntarily resigned from the IAS after a thirteen-year career.
Today, I voluntarily resigned from the IAS, bringing an unforgettable 13-year journey to a close. The resignation of the 43-year-old, 2013-batch Uttar Pradesh-cadre officer, who was serving as special secretary in the revenue department, is yet to be formally accepted.
Village representatives also remember “Mera Gaon, Mera Gaurav”, a WhatsApp group connecting more than 800 pradhans with district officials. Her best-known initiative brought piped water to Lahuriya Deh, a remote hilltop hamlet whose residents had long depended on tankers and water collected from pits. Mittal would tag officials when problems were raised and monitor the response, effectively giving village heads a direct line to the administration.
With those words, Divya Mittal announced on social media on Sunday that she was walking away from the civil services.
During her tenure as Sant Kabir Nagar DM, Mittal found herself at odds with then district minister-in-charge Ashish Patel, husband of Union minister and Mirzapur MP Anupriya Patel, after she sent a representative to receive him instead of attending personally. As Deoria DM, differences during a District Development Coordination and Monitoring Committee meeting also generated controversy.
There had been confrontations earlier, too.
In May 2022, Dhillon resigned from govt service and returned to financial markets. She has said her resignation was neither impulsive nor due to pressure.
In Deoria, she came to be known as the “reel wali DM” due to her frequent social-media posts on govt initiatives, community events and public outreach. He now works as an algorithmic trader at Neuracap, according to his LinkedIn profile. Her visibility added another layer to the friction. Supporters saw it as an effort to make the administration more accessible. Detractors questioned whether the officer’s public profile was beginning to overshadow the institution she represented. The parallel between their careers did not end there. Four years later, Mittal has followed him out of the civil services, although she has given no indication that she intends to return to finance. Former colleagues say Mittal’s ambition and appetite for difficult assignments were evident early in her career. Her batchmate Sunil Kumar Verma recalls that when delays arose in cadre allocation at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mittal and two other officers took on the technically demanding exercise themselves and completed it for the entire batch.