P.S. Appu (Padma Bhushan) belongs to the 1951 batch of the Bihar cadre of the IAS. As Chairman of the Committee on Land Reforms set up by the Planning Commission, he created sensation by stating bluntly in 1972 that lack of political will was the reason for failure of land reforms in the country. He became Chief Secretary of Bihar but left for a lower paid job in the Govt. of India when he found that the conditions he had stipulated for functioning effectively were not being observed by the political executive. As Director of Govt. of India's Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration he took voluntary retirement on finding that the govt. would not punish a trainee guilty of reprehensible conduct. That led to such an uproar in Parliament that the Prime Minister (Indira Gandhi) had to overrule the Home Minister (Swaran Singh) and announced dismissal of the guilty trainee officer from the IAS.
