The District Collector is the district head of administration of the bureaucracy in a state of India. Though he/she is appointed and is under general supervision of the state government, he/she has to be a member of the elite IAS recruited by the Central Government. The post of Collector originally follows from the post of collector of taxes in a revenue district during the British rule in India.

District collectors are officers of the Indian Administrative Service and are the most powerful government officials of the district along with the Superintendent of Police, Commissioner of Police and Commissioner of Income Tax. They are entrusted with the task of handling law and order, revenue collection, taxation, the control of planning permission, and the handling of natural and man-made emergencies. A collector was a crucially important colonial officer placed at the district level and entrusted with the responsibility of revenue collection and other civil duties.District Collector also liaisons with the I-T Department during revenue administration and elections of the states.The deputy commissioner is looked upon as the eyes and ears of the government in such areas as law and order, land administration, disaster management and elections,though election observers from the Indian Revenue Service take charge of both general and local elections. The deputy commissioner works under the general guidance and supervision of the divisional commissioner.

Sir Ronald Ross KCB FRS (13 May 1857 – 16 September 1932) was a British doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. His discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of the Anopheles mosquito led to the realization that malaria was transmitted by Anopheles, and laid the foundation for combating the disease.

Ross was born in India, the eldest son of General Sir Campbell Claye Grant Ross of the British Indian Army and Matilda Charlotte Elderton. His grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Ross, had malaria, and the boy resolved to find a cure for the disease. At the age of eight, he was sent to England for his education.

He commenced the study of medicine in London in 1875. He passed his final examination in 1880 and joined the Indian Medical Service in 1881. His first posting was in Madras. He commenced the study of malaria in 1892.

Ross studied malaria between 1882 and 1899. He worked on malaria at the Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta. Ross built a bungalow with a laboratory at Mahanad village, where he used to stay from time to time collecting mosquitoes in Mahanad and adjoining villages and conducting research. In 1883, Ross was posted as the Acting Garrison Surgeon at Bangalore during which time he noticed the possibility of controlling mosquitoes by controlling their access to water.