Dr Pradnya Saravade is a former officer of the Indian Police Service, with a diverse governance and administrative experience. She has had a remarkable and impactful career encompassing leadership roles in operational excellence, risk management, and general administration. She has always opted for challenging assignments and blazed new trails, gaining unmatched perspectives and insights.
Dr Saravade headed the Maharashtra Railway Police set up for over three years, before her retirement in June 2024. In this apex position, she oversaw several field units, including Commissioner of Railway Police, Mumbai, with the workforce of 8000 people. Her jurisdiction included ensuring policing services for 5500 km of railway track, 727 railway stations, 1304 long distance trains and over 80 lakh daily commuters. Her major achievement was running the Mission Trusted Policing initiative, which focussed on metric-driven supervision over the performance of railway police stations, with a strong citizen feedback loop.
Earlier, she worked for three years as Joint Managing Director of Maharashtra State Police Housing Corporation Limited. In this position, she was supervising building construction projects worth over Rs 1,000 crore, with the assistance of a large team of civil engineers. She introduced technology interventions like new building materials and GIS-based project monitoring, as well as process standardisation.
She has had a strong ethics orientation in her career, picking up operational experience in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), Maharashtra. She later on went on to become the Chief Vigilance Officer of City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO), Maharashtra on deputation, where she revamped the preventive vigilance function through people and process innovations. During this time, she was also in charge of the JNPT Influence Area planning development project.
In her two stints in the Maharashtra Police headquarters, she looked after budgeting, disciplinary actions and other administration issues, as well as planning, procurement and modernisation.
She has a deep understanding of the capital markets domain from a regulatory perspective, thanks to her long stints in CBI and SEBI. She served on deputation to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for three years during 2008-11. As Executive Director, Investigations (and also the Chief Vigilance Officer), she headed SEBI’s investigation team, dealing with securities market manipulations and insider trading. Earlier, while in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), she supervised investigation and prosecution of major bank fraud cases for four years, including India’s first mega-fraud, called the Harshad Mehta scam.
She worked in Mumbai Police as Deputy Commissioner of Police, Enforcement, headed the Cyber Cell and also, the Preventive wing of the Crime Branch, as well as Port Zone. It was during this tenure of hers (2000-03) that large-scale cyber security awareness campaigns were planned and run by Mumbai Police, in collaboration with NASSCOM, and training facilities created for police investigators.
Dr Saravade began her IPS career in West Bengal, where she served for six years, before moving to Mumbai for her deputation with the CBI. She has been awarded the Indian Police Medal for Distinguished Services.
She writes an occasional blog on policing issues. Dr Saravade studied at Grant Medical College in Mumbai and holds the degrees of MBBS and MS (General Surgery).
As a Strategic Adviser to DeepStrat , she brings a wealth of experience in law enforcement, regulation, investigation and governance.
