Virtually a yr after he was appointed an Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar was elevated to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) on Monday.
Kumar’s appointment was introduced hours after the Prime Minister-headed high-level panel met to pick the brand new CEC to succeed Rajiv Kumar, who is about to retire on Tuesday. The assembly noticed the Chief of the Opposition within the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, asking the federal government to defer the appointment till the Supreme Court docket decides on the petitions difficult the brand new appointment course of. The Supreme Court docket is to listen to the matter on Wednesday.
Kumar was appointed to the EC on March 14, 2024, lower than two months after he retired from the IAS. He assumed workplace on March 15 and the very subsequent day, the Election Fee of India introduced the schedule of the Lok Sabha elections.
Prior to now 11 months, Kumar has been part of the Fee, with Rajiv Kumar and fellow EC Dr Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, whereas it carried out the Lok Sabha polls, the primary Meeting elections within the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Meeting elections in Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Delhi. His tenure as CEC will final until January 26, 2029, which is able to see him helm the Fee because it conducts 20 Meeting elections, the elections for President and Vice-President in 2027, and prepares for the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.
A 1988-batch officer of the Kerala cadre, Kumar served because the Secretary of the Cooperation Ministry on the time of his retirement in January 2024. In his profession, he served as Parliamentary Affairs Secretary, Joint Secretary and Extra Secretary within the Ministry of House Affairs (MHA), and Joint Secretary within the Ministry of Defence. In Kerala, he labored throughout a number of departments, together with Public Works Division and Finance. He was additionally the resident commissioner at Kerala Home in Delhi from 2012 to 2016.
An Extra Secretary in MHA from 2018 to 2021, Kumar performed a pivotal position when Article 370 was abrogated in 2019 and Jammu & Kashmir was break up into the 2 Union Territories of Ladakh and Jammu & Kashmir. The Narendra Modi authorities’s belief in Kumar as a bureaucrat is illustrated by the truth that he was not solely given the duty of formulating the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Invoice, probably the most secretive Payments ever introduced by a authorities but in addition that he was concerned within the establishing of the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Belief.
Throughout his tenure as Cooperation Secretary, the Multi-State Cooperative Societies (MSCS) (Modification) Act, 2023, was handed with the purpose of accelerating transparency and accountability within the cooperatives sector.
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Kumar, who’s from Uttar Pradesh, holds a B Tech diploma in civil engineering from IIT Kanpur.— With inputs from Deeptiman Tiwary
