Sikkim IAS officer to give free career counselling

RAJEEV RAVIDAS, TT, 19 Nov 2019, Gangtok: The district collector of East Sikkim, Raj Kumar Yadav, has decided to hold free career counselling classes for school and college students with the help of few fellow officers every Thursday from November 21.

Yadav told The Telegraph that he thought of starting the counselling in order to encourage the students to pursue civil services as a career option. Students interested in other career choices like medicine and engineering can also attend the classes and they, too, will be offered guidance as per their requirement.

"In Sikkim, there are very few numbers of civil service aspirants. So, we thought of conducting counselling classes for interested students. We frequently conduct mega cou- Raj Kumar Yadav nselling classes like this, but there is no willing student," he bemoaned.

The classes will be held on the premises of the East district collector's office at Sichey here in batches of a minimum 10 students to the maximum of 20. "Every session will be of two-hour duration and will be held every Thursday throughout the year. We have decided to keep it to small batches be- cause of space constraint and the fact that we want to provide every detail," he said.

Three batches of students have already registered for the classes. "The first batch will start on November 21. Two or three IAS officers and an IPS officer will conduct the classes," he said, adding that a WhatsApp group would be created to enable students keep in touch with their counsellors and ask follow-up queries anytime.

This is not the first time that the young IAS officer has gone beyond the call of his duty. Yadav was widely recognised for coming out with an innovative rural development programme to encourage students to attend school and augment government facilities at villages while he was the district collector of South Sikkim in 2014