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Ashish Tiwari graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, West Bengal with a BTech and MTech in computer science and engineering in 2007. A 2012 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre, Ashish has held positions of ASP Jhansi, SP rural Varanasi, SP Mirzapur, SSP Etah, SP Jaunpur, SSP Ayodhya, Founder Commandant-Special Security Force (SSF), SP Election (Uttar Pradesh), and SSP Firozabad. He was recognized as one of the 40 promising global leaders in policing by the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police, U.S.A.), who mentioned him in their ‘40 under 40’ list in 2022. He also received the Young Alumni Achiever award from IIT Kharagpur.

Ashish is passionate about SMART (simple and sensitive, moral and modern, accountable, reliable and responsive, trained and technical) policing. He believes in technology, innovations, and entrepreneurial government with a people-centric approach. He has launched multiple technology initiatives to realize SMART policing, which have been institutionalized at the state level and have impacted millions of citizens. He is also a member of various committees, and has been a keynote speaker at many conferences on modernizing policing using technology. To empower women, Ashish has constituted a ‘green group’ of rural women to fight problems of drugs, alcohol, gambling, and domestic violence in various districts. Leveraging technology, under ‘Operation Smile’ in west Uttar Pradesh, Ashish has reunited hundreds of missing children and victims of child trafficking with their families. His innovative strategies in community policing, countering fake news, and digital governance have received public and professional appreciation and widespread media coverage. Ashish has received numerous accolades, including the FICCI smart police officer award, the SKOCH award, the gFiles governance award, triple DGP Commendation (silver, gold, and platinum) discs, and the State Award for Best Electoral Practices.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Ashish is engaged in developing innovative solutions for smart governance and smart policing at the intersection of technology, security, and development. He intends to work at both the federal and the state level to apply new technologies in security and governance.

Mr. Harssh A Poddar is an officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) borne on the Maharashtra cadre. He is an Oxford-educated lawyer and a Chevening scholar who has worked in corporate law with a magic circle law firm in London, before returning to India to pursue a career in law enforcement. He is presently posted as the Commanding Officer of the Maharashtra armed police in Amravati.

A recipient of the Best Officer Award and the Home Minister’s Award for National Integration during the IPS training, Mr. Poddar has strived to change the perception of citizens towards the police. His work has focused on youth empowerment and deradicalization. The Maharashtra Police Youth Parliament Project, conceptualized by him, created an outreach of over 200,000 youth for the Maharashtra Police. He is also credited with the launch of an innovative project, Udaan, that provided free career guidance to thousands of students in communally sensitive regions of the state.

In 2018, Mr. Poddar undertook an extensive campaign against mob violence prompted by misinformation in Malegaon. He also led an operation in which a family was successfully rescued from a violent mob in the city. As part of the SMART police initiative, he has been recreating rural police stations with a view towards providing urban standards of police service-delivery in interior Maharashtra. He has successfully headed the investigation of several organized crimes and has also authored a book on the law relating to investment frauds.

In recent years his work on pandemic law enforcement has become a case study in COVID policing. As the Superintendent of Police of Beed district, the effective implementation by his team of the national lockdown ensured that not a single case of infection was reported in the district during the lockdown. During the devastating second wave, the scientific measures he undertook in the armed police have become a template for protecting frontline workers in the face of a pandemic.

Pursuing a master’s in public administration as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School will help Mr. Poddar to complement the fundamentals of law enforcement policy and global security with his experience in field policing and handling law and order. After completing the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s program, he intends to work at the federal and state level in areas relating to security and law enforcement.