Dharmendra Pradhan is the new Minister of Education of India. He replaced Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, who resigned for health reasons. During the cabinet reshuffle that took place on Wednesday,

• The former Minister of Oil, Natural Gas and Steel, Dharmendra Pradhan has been commissioned by the portfolio of the Ministry of Education, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.
• Mr. Pradhan has been appointed as the new Minister of Education of India, while Annapurna Devi, Subhas Sarkar and Rajkumar Ranjan Singh will be the new Ministers of State for Education.
• The son of Debendra Pradhan, a former Union Minister of State for Surface Transport, Dharmendra was Minister of Petroleum in the previous Cabinet.
• First time he became an MP in 2004 after successfully running in the Deogarh parliamentary constituency. Although he lost the 2009 legislative elections, he became the national secretary of the BJP, then the general secretary.
• In 2012 he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha from Bihar, and when Narendra Modi came to power in the 2014 elections, he was appointed the Union Minister of State for Oil and Natural Gas in an independent position.
• In a ministerial reorganization in 2017, he was elevated to the rank of Union Minister for the same ministry, with an additional position from the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. He again he was appointed minister of the government of Modi 2.0.

Subhas Sarkar, a seasoned BJP workhorse in West Bengal, is a Bankura MP and will now be Minister of State for Education.

Annapurna Devi, who is currently the National Vice President of BJP, has also been named MoS for Education. Previously, she was part of the Rashtriya Janata Dal led by Lalu Prasad until the 2019 legislative elections. She was also president of the RJD state in Jharkhand and had to compete with Koderma in a match. However, she left the RJD and joined the BJP before the elections.

Rajkumar Ranjan Singh, who is the third Minister of State for Education, belongs to a former royal clan of Manipur.

• After graduating from Dhana Manjuri College in Imphal, he obtained his MA in Geography in 1972 from Guwahati University and later a PhD in “land use issues” in Manipur.

• After teaching at Manipur universities, he joined Manipur University (MU) as an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. He was appointed Registrar of the University and served from 2004 to 2008.

• In 2013, he joined the BJP and opposed the election of Lok Sabha the following year. However, his beginnings were unsuccessful.

• In the previous cabinet, Sanjay Dhotre was the Defense Education Department, which also resigned on Wednesday morning.

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