Responding to a viral post about IAS officer Raju Narayana Swamy (IAS:1991:KL)’s career and his anti-corruption crusade on X, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu fondly recalled his days studying at IIT Madras with Swamy, who went on to become an IAS officer. Both Swamy and Sridhar Vembu studied computer science at IIT Madras.
Vembu shared his memory of Swamy’s academic brilliance and his decision to remain in India, unlike most other IIT classmates who preferred to go abroad.
Vembu says that while most of their classmates—including him—went abroad, Swamy chose to stay in India to serve it.
Swamy, a Kerala cadre IAS officer, was a topper of the UPSC civil services exam in 1991. His study highlighting systemic gaps in India’s cybercrime enforcement is drawing wide-spread accolades.
According to Vembu, despite a full scholarship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Swamy stayed in India and prepared for the UPSC exam.
Swamy topped the notoriously difficult UPSC examination and joined the Kerala Cadre in 1991.
The viral post attributed Swamy’s decision to stay back in India to his urge to serve the people of his country. MIT offered him a scholarship. He turned it down. He said the poorest Indians had paid for his IIT education through their taxes. He owed them something back,” that post says.
But Swamy’s bureaucratic career has been marked by several transfers because of his uncompromising stand on corruption. Interestingly, Swamy’s crusade against corruption finds mention in a post on the IIT Kanpur website that reads: “Dr. Raju Narayana Swamy is an IAS officer highly known for his staunch stand against corruption. His relentless fight against illegal land dealings, real-estate businessmen and political bureaucrats comes from his ‘stubborn’ nature, as he likes to put it, when things turn ‘unjustifiable.'”
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