According to a Personnel Ministry decision, the Centre on Thursday loosened crucial regulations to grant Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba a one-year extension past August 30, 2023. He will hold the record for the nation’s longest-serving cabinet secretary after this third extension is complete.
B D Pande held the title of longest-serving cabinet secretary up until this point. He served from November 2, 1972, to March 31, 1977. Gauba, a former Union home secretary, was nominated to the highest bureaucratic position for the nation in 2019 for a two-year term. In August of last year and again in 2021, he received one-year extensions. Gauba, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the 1982 batch and a member of the Jharkhand cadre, has been granted a one-year extension in his or her employment, in accordance with a relaxation of the AIS or All India Services (Death-cum-Retirement Benefits or DCRB)
The rules permit the central government to offer the cabinet secretary an extension of service if it is in the public interest, “provided that the total term of the cabinet secretary, who is granted such extensions of service, shall not exceed four years.” Gauba will be able to retain his position through the general elections scheduled for early next year thanks to the most recent extension.
Gauba is credited with being the primary architect of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, which saw the former state divided into the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh after the special status granted to it under Article 370 of the Constitution was revoked. Rules, 1958, and Rule 56(d) of the Fundamental Rules, according to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC).
Along with other duties, he had held the positions of additional secretary in the interior ministry and secretary in the Union’s department for urban development, where he oversaw a vital section dealing with left-wing extremism. Gauba, a Patna University graduate who was born in Punjab, has a degree in physics. Before returning to the federal government in 2016, he had worked as the chief secretary for 15 months in Jharkhand.
