Rajesh Kumar Chaturvedi joins as the new CBSE Chairperson

The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) headed by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently selected Rajesh Kumar Chaturvedi as the new chairperson of CBSE. The appointment of Chaturvedi as the CBSE Chairperson came after the recent cabinet reshuffle and Prakash Javdekar being the new HRD minister.

Since December 2014, the CBSE was running without any chairperson and during the Smriti Irani regime of HRD ministry the recruitment in the post couldn’t get completed for quite a many reasons. Rajesh Kumar is an IAS officer of 1987 batch and belongs to the Madhya Pradesh cadre. He has wide range of expertise in revenue and commerce departments. Though, this would be first time he would be working in the education sector.

The ACC decided that the chairperson of CBSE should be appointed through central staffing scheme and not through search-cum-selection committee method, which made Chaturvedi a frontrunner for the post. The ACC had rejected the name of Sarvendra Vikram Bahadur Singh for the post earlier and the recruitment in the post would finally end the controversy surrounding the two year old vacant CBSE chairman post.

Singh’s name got recommended by the HRD ministry led by Smrit Irani and it got rejected earlier by the ACC. This was the second time that names of recommended chairperson from HRD got rejected by the ACC. A search-cum-selection committee had earlier sent the name of Satbir Bedi, who was a joint secretary in HRD ministry, for the CBSE chairperson post, but it got cordoned off as well. The DoPT raised questions regarding Bedi’s recruitment to the post as he didn’t have the basic qualification of three year education administrator experience of three years, which was mandatory for the post. After his name got canceled, a new search-cum-selection committee was formed for selection of chairperson post in CBSE.