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Padma winner Parveen Talha proved her mettle in badlands of western Uttar Pradesh

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President Pranab Mukherjee presents the Padma Bhushan to tennis star Leander Paes at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on Saturday
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Parveen Talha is the perfect embodiment of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. She calls herself a true 'Lucknow wali' and has the soul of a poet. It's hard to believe, then, that she once served as a deputy narcotics commissioner, and went about busting opium dealers in the badlands of western Uttar Pradesh.

The 67-year-old is India's first Muslim woman to have joined the civil services, in 1969. And that is just among the many firsts in her long career in Indian Revenue Service (IRS).

She is the only woman officer to have worked in the Central Bureau of Narcotics and India's first heroin seizure was under her direction. "It wasn't a hefty amount, less than a kilo in fact, but it was heroin nevertheless. We raided a little house in Barabanki, where heroin was being made in a stop-gap kitchen," she said. The year was 1983 and no one had heard of the drug. "Villagers gathered around us and word spread that we had raided a heroine for tax evasion," she said.

Talha is among the 56 people President Pranab Mukherjee honoured with Padma awards at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on Saturday. The list include actors Paresh Rawal and Vidya Balan, ace tennis player Leander Paes and author Ruskin Bond.

Talha is one of the few bureaucrats to have received Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the country, for her work in civil services. In the 90s, she was known for having attached the properties of smugglers and drug traffickers. She once caught an MLA with a large amount of heroin under his bed and was, of course, transferred the very next day.

Talha was teaching at the Lucknow University when she cleared her civil services examination and said it was her father's dream to see her in the services. "He was very ambitious about me and I was clear from the start that I wanted to be a bureaucrat," she said.

Talha does not make much of being one of the few women in the services (her batch had only two). "Of course, there were people who tried to bring me down for being a woman and a Muslim, but I never let that affect me. Some would say I wasn't fit to head the narcotics department in UP as most peddlers were Muslim, but I went about my work," she said, adding that the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) is one of the few places where there's no discrimination of any kind. "If you are good you will rise," she said. Talha went on to become the first IRS officer to be appointed member of the UPSC in 2004 and left office in 2009.

Some of the other winners
Padma Bhushan
Leander Paes, 40:
Tennis player, considered to be one of the greatest and most respected contemporary doubles and mixed doubles players in the world.
Ruskin Bond, 79: Indian author of British descent. He was awarded Padma Shri in 2009.
Radhakrishnan Koppilli, 64: scientist, chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), chairman, board of management, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.

Padma Shri
Paresh Rawal, 63:
Film and stage actor from Gujarati background. He is fighting the ongoing Lok Sabha elections from Ahmadabad (East) on BJP ticket.
Anjum Chopra, 36: Cricket player.
Prof Dinesh Singh, 59: Vice Chancellor of the University of Delhi.

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