New Delhi: Sundar Burra, a former IAS officer and a member of the Constitutional Conduct Group known for its open letters to the government, died in Faridabad on Friday (January 24) after a monthslong illness. He was 75.
His remains are scheduled to be cremated at the Lodhi Crematorium in Delhi on Saturday afternoon.
A graduate of Brandeis University’s 1971 undergraduate batch, Burra’s tenure as a bureaucrat included a posting as secretary in the Maharashtra government.
Having joined the IAS in 1974, Burra also variously served as faculty in the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, a deputy secretary in the Union agriculture ministry and the director of a World Bank-funded project on slums and low-income shelter in Mumbai.
After prematurely retiring from the IAS in 1996, he was adviser to the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres NGO that works on “housing and infrastructure issues for the urban poor”.
He was also known for being part of the Constitutional Conduct Group comprising former civil servants that penned open letters – often published in The Wire – that spoke out against events that it deemed eroded constitutional values in India’s politics and government.
The latest open letter written by the group – among whose 101 signatories was Burra – was published on October 28 last year and addressed to Union home minister Amit Shah and spoke out against the alleged “fomenting of communal unrest” in Uttarakhand.
Burra was also among petitioners from the Constitutional Conduct Group that moved the Supreme Court against the Sudarshan News Hindutva channel for alleging a “conspiracy” by Muslims to “infiltrate” government service.
Photo by arrangement.
