Lucknow: It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome for IAS officer Rinku Singh Rahi on his first day as Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) of Shahjahanpur district. Protesting lawyers “forced” him to do sit-ups holding his ears at his office campus Tuesday.
The IAS officer on Wednesday however said that he wasn’t forced, but he had done it to set an example. A video of his sit-ups is now viral on social media.
According to Rahi, during an inspection on Tuesday, he had found garbage lying around and people urinating in the open in the office campus. He made the defaulters do sit-ups. He also similarly “punished” parents of school children found loitering around.
One of those who underwent this humiliating “punishment” was a legal clerk. Shahajahanpur-based lawyer Virendra Kumar Yadav told ThePrint that Rahi made their clerk do sit-ups after finding him urinating in the open.
This led to the lawyers protesting and when they asked him if he would do sit-ups as penance for the dirty condition of the tehsil, Rahi agreed that it was the administration’s fault, and promptly did sit-ups holding his ears.
Rahi explained later, “An official told me that a lot of cleaning had been done recently, but if it’s still dirty, then it’s our responsibility.” He said that he wanted to set an example and improve relations with the lawyers.
In fact, Rinku Singh Rahi, who was transferred from Mathura to Shahjahanpur, says that if someone makes a mistake, he should be punished so that he does not make the same mistake again. “To explain this, I did sit-ups myself,” he said.
The protest was called off after Rahi’s public gesture, which many saw as a sign of honesty and accountability. He also clarified that the version on social media—that he was pressured to do the sit-ups by the lawyers—was wrong.
When ThePrint contacted Rahi, he reiterated the above statements.
Who is Rinku Singh Rahi?
Though Rahi joined the IAS civil services in 2023, he was initially with the state government services. Later he was selected in the Senior Subordinate Services Examination and became the District Social Welfare Officer.
In 2008, when he was posted in Muzaffarnagar, he exposed the corruption of crores in the scholarship and fee reimbursement scheme. After this, in 2009, he was shot at while playing badminton. He was severely injured and lost vision in one eye.
It was in 2022, that he sat the UPSC exam under the differently-abled quota and fulfilled his dream of becoming an IAS.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)