A prominent Indian civil servant has resigned from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) after thirteen years of public duty. Divya Mittal, an elite IIT Delhi and IIM Bangalore graduate who once worked for investment bank JPMorgan in London, announced her decision on social media today.

Repaying the debt to her homeland

Originally from Delhi, Mittal left her high-flying finance career abroad because she felt a deep sense of incompleteness away from home. Returning to India, she joined the 2013-batch of the IAS to repay what she termed a debt to her country's soil.

During her administrative service, she worked as a district magistrate in Sant Kabir Nagar, Deoria, and Mirzapur. Her tenure was marked by highly impactful projects. In Mirzapur's Lahuriya Deh village, she successfully delivered piped tap water to 125 families, ending a 75-year-long wait. Drawing from her own language-learning experiences, she also built a free mobile application to assist first-generation students in rural Uttar Pradesh. Her most recent post was Special Secretary in the Revenue Department in Lucknow.

Mittal, whose husband Gagandeep Singh is also an alumnus of her universities and a former bureaucrat, stated that while her formal role has concluded, her dream of serving the nation remains active. She reflected that her work taught her to look beyond government paperwork and focus entirely on restoring human dignity