Secretary in PMO Ramanujam gets three months' extension

NEW DELHI: R Ramanujam, Secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, has got a three-month extension till September this year.

The extension to Ramanujam, the Secretary in the PMO, has been approved by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet ( ACC) in public interest on contract basis for a period of three months beyond the date of his superannuation, i.e. up to September 30, 2014, an official release said today.

Ramanujam, a 1979-batch IAS officer of Madhya Pradesh cadre, had joined as Additional Secretary in the PMO on September 1, 2011. He became Secretary in the PMO on November 1 of last year.

He worked in the PMO between 1997 and 2000, when Inder Kumar Gujral (Janata Dal) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee (BJP), respectively, were Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, the appointment of IAS officer Rajiv Nayan Choubey as Additional Secretary in the PMO has been cancelled by the government.

The Narendra Modi-led ACC has approved the cancellation of the appointment of Choubey, a 1981-batch IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, according to an official order.

Choubey, who was earlier the Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Power, was appointed as Additional Secretary in the PMO on June 12.

The new posting was necessitated after Shatrughna Singh was moved out from the PMO to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP).

Singh, a 1983-batch Uttarakhand cadre IAS officer, had joined PMO in 2010 as a Joint Secretary. He was later made Additional Secretary in the PMO.

He was in the news last year as one of the two officers who attended the meeting convened by the then Law Minister Ashwani Kumar to discuss a CBI probe report on the multi-crore coal-block allocation scam, which was to be submitted in Supreme Court.

Following the issue, Kumar had to quit the post. Meanwhile, a controversy has erupted after the appointment of private secretaries to three Union Ministers, including Home Minister Rajnath Singh, was put on hold recently.

For his PS, Rajnath Singh had proposed the name of IPS officer Alok Singh, who had served in the same capacity under Salman Khurshid when he was the External Affairs Minister under the previous UPA dispensation.

However, the appointment of Alok Singh, a 1995-batch Uttar Pradesh cadre officer, was not cleared by Modi, official sources said.