Bhushan Gagrani, an IAS officer who worked in the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) under the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP administration in Maharashtra, was named as the additional chief secretary to the new CM Eknath Shinde on Wednesday.
According to a formal announcement, Shinde, who took the oath of office on June 30, would have a second chief secretary who is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the 1990-batch.
Former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who led the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition from 2014 to 2019, employed Gagrani as his secretary. Fadnavis is now the Shinde administration’s deputy chief minister.
After Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray took over as chief minister in November 2019 when the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was created, the top bureaucrat continued in the crucial position for a brief period of eroding an RTI (Right to Information) request, Gagrani was later relocated outside of the CMO. The IAS officer, however, was a member of the COVID-19 task committee that the MVA government established in March 2020 to address the coronavirus pandemic.
