AK Bhalla leaving DGFT, will be new Power Secretary

The Dollar Business Bureau 

Ajay Kumar Bhalla, the Director General of Foreign Trade will be leaving the charge of Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) on June 30. 

Bhalla, a 1984 batch IAS officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre who earlier served as the Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, will be joining as the new Power Secretary. He will take over the new charge from Power Secretary P K Pujari, who is retiring on June 30. 

“The new name for the post of DGFT has not yet been decided. It will be decided within a day or two,” sources in DGFT office told The Dollar Business. 

Bhalla, who had taken the charge in October 2016, is the fourth DGFT to leave the post in less than four years. 

DGFT is entrusted with responsibilities for formulating and implementing the foreign trade policy, with the main objective of promoting India’s exports.  

This is a part of the major reshuffle that has been taken at the top bureaucratic level on Wednesday, in which Urban Development Secretary Rajiv Gauba was also named as the new Home Secretary. 

Durga Shanker Mishra, who is the Additional Secretary, will replace Gauba as Urban Development Secretary. 

Culture Secretary N K Sinha will assume the charge of the new Information and Broadcasting Secretary in place of Ajay Mittal, who has been appointed as the DoPT secretary, in place of B P Sharma who is retiring this month.

Senior bureaucrat Subhash C Garg, Executive Director in World Bank, will be the new Department of Economic Affairs Secretary, a post that had been vacant since the retirement of Shaktikanta Das.

Aruna Sundararajan, who is Secretary in Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), will be taking over as the new Telecom Secretary.