Debashis Sen is a public servant, a civil servant, an IAS officer. He understands governance. And cities. He believes in innovation-on-the-go. He can communicate with stakeholders, trying to empathize with their pains and aspirations. He is tech savyy and is focused on bringing the digital wave to the street.
In city development, he had been heading the Urban Development Department of the State Government for seven years. He has been a leader in transforming a vacant green-field land mass into a Smart Green City with an estimated 60,000 people now. For ten years, he has been, and continues to be, the CEO (MD/CMD) of a public undertaking that is focused on developing a 7,000 acre satellite township of Kolkata. Every day, he has been injecting innovative interventions in the realm of e-Governance, stakeholder consultation, Senior Citizen care, inclusive growth, sustainable development, use of Blockchain technology for issue of Birth and Death Certificates, use of Artificial Intelligence for road monitoring, Cloud based IoT tech for controlling street lights and more. He has been constantly aiming at bringing in youth and innovation in New Town Kolkata through a cluster approach in FinTech, Silicon Valley IT Hub, Education Hub and Health Hub. On a larger canvas, he was principally responsible for creating the first ever Town Ship Policy of the state, a policy that strived to create viable and sustainable theme-based townships for improved urban development.
His creative ‘Anandababu’ was a trend setting icon in conduct of elections in a state having 50 million electors, in the five years he was the State’s Chief Electoral Officer responsible for conducting elections. Anandababu was a friendly helpline manned 24x7, backed by a team of professionals, and was virally popular and established a connection with voters from near and far, people who did not have a smart-phone then for a web search. A decade later, a toll-free helpline is serving as the New Town Helpline in receiving calls, now backed by a CRM software application.
With around 34 years of experience in the Indian Administrative Service, Debashis Sen is a seasoned administrator with expertise and experience across diverse fields including, smart city, public finance, eGovernance, G2B/G2C service delivery, public infrastructure, ease of doing business, electoral reforms, sustainable development, startup ecosystem, investment facilitation and more. He has held senior administrative posts ranging from Additional Chief Secretary, Chief Electoral Officer, chairmanships of multiple development authorities among others. He has been the driving force behind some landmark initiatives of the Government of West Bengal in the urban development and information technology sectors. He has been trained at the Harvard University (conflict negotiation) and IMFInstitute (public finance).