• Source:JND
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Gyanesh Kumar has been appointed as the new Chief Election Commissioner of India on Monday. Kumar is a 1988-batch IAS officer from the Kerala cadre and holds a significant experience as a bureaucrat. He will replace the outgoing Rajiv Kumar and will oversee the conduct of the upcoming state legislative polls of the country.

While his first major project will be Bihar Assembly election, he will also oversee the conduct of the polls in several states, including Bengal, Assam, and Tamil Nadu next year. Kumar is senior of the two remaining commissioners after Rajiv Kumar retired.

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While the other member Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, an officer from the Uttarakhand cadre, joined the services in the same year, Kumar was given preference as his name comes first in the appointment notification issued by Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Who Is Gyanesh Kumar?

Kumar, 61, hold a major experience in bureaucracy and has worked on many profiles. Before being part of the committee of the Election Commission, he was also a part of the Union Home Ministry. He even played a critical role in some of the key decisions of the current government. He helped the home ministry to draft the bill that scrapped infamous Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, which later was divided into two union territories.

He was working as a Joint Secretary of the Kashmir Division in the Home Ministry at that time and had framed the bill by closely studying the political and geographical conditions of the then state. 

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A year later, he also played a vital role by handling documents related to the much awaited Ram Mandir case in the Supreme Court. He is reportedly known to be close to the Union Home Minister Amit Shah and retired as Secretary of the Ministry of Cooperation, which is also led Amit Shah.

Before working in the home ministry, he had also provided his services in the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs. He was posted to the Defence Ministry in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. He did his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Engineering in Kanpur and later studied in the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India. He also went to the Harvard University to study Environmental Economics.