Cabinet reshuffle: 43 ministers take oath in PM Narendra Modi’s mega ministerial expansion

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In a major rejig, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday brought in Sarbananda Sonowal, Narayan Rane and Jyotiraditya Scindia as Cabinet ministers while dropping as many as 12 ministers including Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar. A total of 43 new ministers were sworn in as PM Modi tries to revamp his administration. With this reshuffle, PM Modi’s new cabinet now has 77 ministers.

As many as 15 Cabinet ministers, including some new faces, were sworn-in at the swearing in ceremony held in the Darbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Rane, 69, a Rajya Sabha MP and a former Maharashtra chief minister, was the first to take oath. After Rane, Sonowal, former Assam chief minister, took oath. Congress-turned-BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia, a Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh, also took oath as a Cabinet minister. Scindia has been Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power and Union Minister of State for Commerce & Communications in the earlier UPA government.

Lok Sabha MP from Tikamgarh in Madhya Pradesh Virendra Kumar, Rajya Sabha MP from Odisha Ashwini Vaishnaw, Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar and JD(U) leader R C P Singh, Lok Sabha MP from Bihar’s Hajipur Pashupati Kumar Paras, were also sworn-in as Cabinet ministers.

Kiren Rijiju, R K Singh, Hardeep Singh Puri, Mansukh Mandaviya, Parshottam Rupala, G Kishan Reddy and Anurag Thakur were elevated to the Cabinet-level. Bhupendra Yadav, who has been serving in the BJP organisation as a general secretary, was also sworn-in as a Cabinet minister.

Bureaucrat-turned politician Raj Kumar Singh who steered Modi government’s power sector reforms agenda that made India surplus in electricity, was on Wednesday elevated as a Cabinet Minister from Minister of State rank.

Key ministries like finance (Nirmala Sitharaman), home affairs (Amit Shah), railways (Piyush Goyal), Road Transport & Highways/MSME (Nitin Gadkari), and external affairs (S. Jaishankar) remain untouched for now.

Earlier, four senior Union ministers — Prasad, Javadekar, Vardhan, Ramesh Pokhriyal — were among 12 ministers who resigned on Wednesday ahead of the cabinet reshuffle.

Besides these four, Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister D V Sadananda Gowda, Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar, Minister of State for Education Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State for Women and Child Development Debasree Chaudhuri, Minister of State for Jal Shakti Rattan Lal Kataria and Minister of State for Environment Babul Supriyo also resigned.

(PTI contributed to this story)