An officer and a troubleshooter

Surinderjit Singh Sandhu

THE peasantry of West Punjab was hit hard by the Partition. With the efforts of some ICS officers, farmers got land in lieu of the immovable property they had left behind in Pakistan. However, they did not have money for seeds, bullocks, fertilisers and farm implements. Small loans were given for the purpose. With the income from agriculture generally being negligible, the amount to be repaid kept piling up, along with normal and penal interest. The farmers who were able to repay the loans also faced problems.

Our family had got such a loan to the tune of Rs 7,000. My father, who had also got a government job, used to regularly pay the instalments. But invariably, we would get demand notices for the money which we had already repaid along with penal interest. My father would get hold of the treasury receipts, take leave from his office and proceed to Ferozepur, where the land had been allotted to us, to get the account books updated.

On his return home, he would abuse the clerks who were issuing the notices despite the fact that the instalments had been paid. He would also narrate the travails of travelling from Amritsar to Ferozepur. The Harike barrage had not been constructed then. A Punjab Roadways bus would go up to Harike; the passengers would get down there to take boats to cross the confluence of the Sutlej and the Beas. Subsequently, a bus would take them to Ferozepur. Nevertheless, notices with the addition of normal and penal interest would reappear next year.

Once, my father told me to go to Ferozepur to get the matter resolved as he was not well. I was doing BA in those days. I was terrified at the prospect of visiting a tehsil or the Deputy Commissioner’s office. I had an aversion to the dingy buildings of tehsils and police stations, unaware that I would eventually have to spend many years in such offices. Willy-nilly, I went to Ferozepur to meet the DC. He gave me a patient hearing and called both the branch officer of the revenue branch and the Assistant Superintendent, Revenue. The tehsildar and another official were also summoned. It was revealed that the challans were allowed to pile up and not incorporated in the accounts register. Resultantly, thousands of farmers suffered this ordeal.

The DC suspended a tehsil employee and put on duty additional staff to enter details of the pending challans in the account books. This served my purpose.

A decade later, I joined the civil service and was coincidentally posted in the same border district. I made enquiries about the people who used to repay loans with great difficulty but were shown as defaulters in the account books. I was told that the DC had worked day and night to get the records updated. Assisted by patwaris and kanungos, he had accomplished this important task but never boasted about it. Old-timers remembered this noble administrator for a long time.

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