Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday brought a major reshuffle and extension of his council, promoting 7 existing ministers of state to the rank of the Cabinet, adding 36 new new ministers and dropping 12 senior ministers. Those inducted today included Maharashtra strongman Narayan Tutu Rane, the first among the 43 new ministers to be administered the oath of office by President Ram Nath Kovind at a ceremony in the iconic Darbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhawan.
The 15 new Cabinet ministers included two allies, Ram Chandra Prasad Singh, the national president of the JD-U, and Pashupati Kumar Paras, Apna Dal MP Anupriya Patel, a prominent Kurmi face from Uttar Pradesh, New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi and MP from Uttarakhand Ajay Bhatt, was included as a minister of state.
Meanwhile, those who resigned to make way for them are Cabinet ministers Thawar Chand Gehlot (now the Karnataka Governor), Ravi Shankar Prasad, Prakash Javadekar, Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Harsh Vardhan, DV Sadananda Gowda and ministers of state Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Babul Supriyo, Dhotre Sanjay Shamrao, Rattan Lal Kataria, Pratap Chandra Sarangi and Debasree Chaudhuri.
Also, Some were rewarded for their performance and promoted to the Cabinet rank include Kiran Rijiju, a prominent face from the Northeast, bureaucrats RK Singh and Hardeep Puri, Gujarat MPs Mansukh Mandaviya and Purushottam Rupala, Secunderabad representative G Kishan Reddy who is considered close to Home Minister Amit Shah, and Hamirpur MP Anurag Thakur.
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