Bhushan Gagrani, an IAS officer who was part of the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) during the BJP government in Maharashtra headed by Devendra Fadnavis, was on Wednesday appointed as the additional chief secretary to the new CM Eknath Shinde.
The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the 1990-batch will be the additional chief secretary to Shinde, who took oath of his new office on June 30, an official release said.
Gagrani previously served as the principal secretary to then-chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who headed the Shiv Sena-BJP government from 2014 to 2019. Fadnavis is now the deputy chief minister in the Shinde administration.
The senior bureaucrat briefly continued in the key post after Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray took over as chief minister in November 2019 when the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was formed.
Gagrani was later moved out of the CMO in the wake of an RTI (Right to Information) query. However, the IAS officer was part of the COVID-19 task force formed by the MVA government in March 2020 to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
