Gyanesh Kumar has been appointed as the new chief election commissioner of India on Monday evening, according to the Law Ministry. He is the first CEC to be appointed under the new law on the appointment of election commissioner.
Who Is Gyanesh Kumar
1988-batch IAS officer from the Kerala cadre, Gyanesh Kumar, 61, previously served in the Union Home Ministry where he played a key in drafting the bill that scrapped Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 and leading to the reorganisation of the former state into two union territories, according to NDTV.
At the time, he held the position of Joint Secretary (Kashmir Division) in the Home Ministry. A year later, Kumar as an Additional Secretary, was responsible for handling documents related to the Supreme Court case on the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
Sources indicate that Kumar is closely associated with Home Minister Amit Shah. He retired from civil service in January last year as Secretary of the Ministry of Cooperation, which is also headed by Shah. Before that, he served as Secretary in the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and was also posted in the Defence Ministry during the Congress-led UPA government.
Kumar holds a B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Engineering in Kanpur. He has also studied Business Finance at the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India and Environmental Economics at Harvard University.
