Meet Gyanesh Kumar: The New Chief Election Commissioner

New Delhi: Gyanesh Kumar, who was appointed as an Election Commissioner in March of last year, has been appointed the new Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and will succeed the outgoing Rajiv Kumar. Gyanesh Kumar, a 1988-batch IAS officer from the Kerala cadre, is the senior of the two commissioners on the three-member panel that was led by Rajiv Kumar until he stepped down. The other commissioner on the panel is Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, an officer from the Uttarakhand cadre.

After assuming the charge, Gyanesh Kumar will be responsible for overseeing the Bihar Assembly elections later this year, as well as elections in Bengal, Assam , and Tamil Nadu in the following year.

Who Is Gyanesh Kumar?

• Gyanesh Kumar, 61, was previously part of the Union Home Ministry.
• Kumar played an important role in drafting the bill that abrogated Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, leading to the bifurcation of the state into two union territories.
• He served as Joint Secretary (Kashmir Division) in the Home Ministry.
• As an Additional Secretary in the Home Ministry, he also handled documents related to the Supreme Court case concerning the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.
• He retired from civil service in January last year as Secretary of the Ministry of Cooperation, which was headed by Amit Shah .
• Before this, Kumar served as Secretary in the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs.
• During the Congress -led United Progressive Alliance government, he was posted in the Defence Ministry.

Education

• Kumar holds a B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Engineering, Kanpur.
• He has studied Business Finance from the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India.
• He also pursued Environmental Economics at Harvard University.

Rajiv Kumar Retires

The outgoing CEC, Rajiv Kumar, stepped down this morning. In his farewell speech, Kumar addressed several issues, including the introduction of remote voting mechanisms for NRIs and migrant workers, biometric authentication to cast votes, and the non-disclosure of votes received by each candidate at any given polling station to prevent post-poll violence.