A public office,
held in plain sight.

Every officer of the Indian Police Service begins from the same premise: the authority they exercise is not theirs. It is lent by statute, to be used on behalf of people who will mostly never meet them, and returned intact at the end of a posting. Vikas Sunda's service — from a sub-division in Bharuch to the coastal security establishment at Gandhinagar, from Raj Bhavan to the district charge of Kutch (West) — has been shaped by taking that premise seriously.

Allotted to the Gujarat cadre in 2018, he entered a state that compresses an unusual number of policing problems into one jurisdiction. Gujarat has heavy industry and a long agrarian hinterland; it has one of the longest coastlines in India and an international land border; it has cities that host enormous seasonal gatherings and districts where the nearest police station may be an hour of hard driving away. An officer's first decade here is an education in variety.

His present charge is Kutch (West), with headquarters at Bhuj. It is a district that resists generalisation. Salt flats give way to creek and coastline; a rebuilt city sits within reach of a frontier; industry, pastoralism, pilgrimage and tourism all move across the same limited network of roads. Holding it means running an organisation whose ordinary work — registration, investigation, traffic, verification, response — must remain intact while its extraordinary work is prepared for and, ideally, never required.

In August 2025 that preparation was formally acknowledged from outside the police service. On Independence Day the Chief of the Army Staff commendation was conferred on him for exemplary service during Operation Sindoor. Recognition of a district Superintendent of Police by the Army is uncommon; where it happens, it reflects work done at the seam between civil and military responsibility, which is precisely where a border district lives.