37 IAS Cadre Empaneled As Secretary-Level Officers

The information note issued by the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) said, “The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved empanelment of IAS officers for holding posts at the Centre at the level of Secretary or Secretary-equivalent.”

Among the officers three from 1992-batch — Asish Srivastava (Madhya Pradesh cadre), Rajendra Kumar (Tamil Nadu cadre) and Shashi Ranjan Kumar (Tripura cadre) — have been empaneled to the level of Secretary/Secretary-equivalent.

Four belonging to the 1993-batch — Dheeraj Kumar of the AGMUT cadre, Neeraj Sekhar and Sukriti Likhi of the Haryana cadre, and Rakesh Kumar Verma of the Punjab cadre — have been empaneled to the level of Secretary/Secretary-equivalent.    

Twenty two IAS officers of the 1994-batch, including A P Das Joshi, Niraj Verma and Samir Kumar Sinha, all belonging to the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, have been empaneled to the level of Secretary/Secretary-equivalent, along with four officers from the Chhattisgarh cadre — Manoj Kumar Pingua, Nidhi Chhibber, Richa Sharma and Vikas Sheel — as is Ashish Chandra of the Bihar cadre.

Others include Anuradha Thakur (Himachal Pradesh), Sanjay Garg (Kerala), Arvind Shrivastava (Karnataka), Vennecaganti Radha (Maharashtra) Rajesh Agarwal (Manipur) Hari Ranjan Rao (Madhya Pradesh), Pallavi Jain Govil (Madhya Pradesh), Vivek Aggarwal (Madhya Pradesh), Piyush Goyal (Nagaland), Ranjana Chopra (Odisha), Santosh Kumar sarangi (Odisha), Tejveer Singh (Punjab), Naresh Pal Gangwar (Rajasthan) and P Amudha (Tamil Nadu).

Another eight officer of the three batches have been empaneled to the level of Secretary-equivalent. They include K Gopal (Tamil Nadu cadre) and Anand Bardhan (Uttarakhand cadre), both from the 1992-batch, along with an officer of the 1993-batch, Khilli Ram Meena (AGMUT cadre).

The five other officers are of the 1994-batch. They include L S Ganeshan (Assam-Meghalaya), Rajesh Kumar Sinha (Kerala), Srivatsa Krishna (Karnataka), Roli Singh (Rajasthan) and Kakarla Usha (Tamil Nadu).   

According to convention, before empanelment, a batch is considered ‘freezed’ when the docket of eligible officers is moved to the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), seeking vigilance clearance. 

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, there has been a practice of taking up two batches every year for empanelment, but in 2024, only 1993-batch officers were empaneled in February. 

Sources said the government had reasons not to take up two batches in the same year (2024), as there existed a shortage of ‘inventory’ (availability of Secretary-level posts) and the posting of senior batches as Secretary at the Centre were yet to be saturated.