Ashwini Vaishnaw is MoC and Devusinh Chauhan the Minister of State for Communications

The first Cabinet reshuffle since the Narendra Modi-led government took office saw 12 ministers getting axed, seven junior ministers being promoted as Cabinet ministers, and 36 new faces being inducted to the council of ministers at the swearing in ceremony held in the Darbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Several important ministries in the Indian government now have new leaders with the administration unveiling a new-look cabinet. Some top cabinet ministers have new portfolios—the new Cooperation Ministry will be headed by Home Minister Amit Shah, Piyush Goyal lost railways but has been put in charge of textiles, earlier under Smriti Irani. Many have been elevated from minister of state to cabinet rank and given new portfolios to manage.

Ashwini Vaishnaw has been appointed as Minister of Electronics and Information Technology; Minister of Communications; and Railways. Rajeev Chandrasekhar the Minister of State in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Ashwini Vaishnaw is a Rajya Sabha MP for Odisha. A former IAS officer of the 1994 batch, he handled important responsibilities over 15 years and was particularly known for his contribution to the PPP framework in Infrastructure.

Post that, the 50-year-old has held leadership roles across major global companies such as General Electric and Siemens. He has an MBA from Wharton School, Pennysylvania University and MTech from IIT Kanpur.

During his stint as an IAS officer, Vaishnaw worked as the District Magistrate-cum Collector of Balasore and Cuttack districts. His bureaucratic acumen, in fact, came to the fore when the super cyclone hit Odisha in 1999 killing at least 10,000 people.

As collector of the coastal Balasore district, Vaishnaw collected information on the cyclone from a US Navy website and sent reports to the chief secretary at regular intervals. His information helped the state government to take advanced measures in order to save lives.

Vaishnaw worked in Odisha till 2003, before being appointed as deputy secretary in the office of former Prime Minister A B Vajpayee. He was later appointed as Vajpayee’s private secretary after the NDA lost the election in 2004.

A product of IIT, Vaishnaw, quit government service in 2008 and went to Wharton University in USA to pursue an MBA. On his return, after working for top firms, he set up his own automotive components manufacturing units in Gujarat.

Interestingly, in April, Vaishnaw was nominated as a member of the Press Council of India, for three years.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar is Bengaluru-based and third time Member of Parliament. The portfolio he will handle include Minister of State  in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

An engineering graduate from Manipal Institute of Technology, Chandrasekhar started his journey at Intel in Silicon Valley, where he was a part of the team that designed Pentium under the now CEO Pat Gelsinger and Vinod Dham, who is called the father of Pentium chips. In his office in Benglauru, the framed Intel chip hangs in his office with more than a dozen names of people, who worked on the chip, written on it.

After his short stint in the US, Chandrasekhar came back to India in 1991 and founded BPL Mobile in 1994, where he built the country’s largest Cellular Network. He exited the company by selling his stakes to the Essar group for $1.1 billion in 2005. Chandrasekhar then later founded private equity firm Jupiter Capital in 2006, where he was Chairman till 2014.

He was the independent member of Rajya Sabha from April 2006 to 2018, when he was re-elected to Rajya Sabha from Karnataka as a member of BJP.

Readers may recall that Before Chandrasekhar sold his BPL Mobile stake, his father-in-law TPG Nambiar took him to court for mismanagement of the company and discrepancies in the shareholding pattern in 2004 and filed a petition to restrain Chandrasekhar from selling or transferring BPL Mobiles without his consent. He also had a stake in Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV. However, in 2019, Chandrasekhar diluted its shareholding making Goswami a majority shareholder.

Other ministers

The President of India, as advised by the Prime Minister, has directed the allocation of other portfolios among the following members of the Council of Ministers as:

Cabinet Ministers

Ministers of State (Independent Charge)

Ministers of State

CT Bureau