Madhya Pradesh: IAS officer Malay Shrivastava appointed MPPEB chairman

BHOPAL: In a reshuffle of senior Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, the Madhya Pradesh government has appointed Malay Shrivastava as the new chairman of the Professional Examination Board (PEB), earlier known as Vyapam, official sources said on Friday. He succeeded senior bureaucrat ICP Keshari who retired from service on Thursday. Keshari was also serving as the vice-chairman of the Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA) at the time of his retirement.

Shrivastava will continue to hold the charge of additional chief secretary (ACS) in the public health engineering department, the sources said. Senior IAS officer S N Mishra has been posted as the vice-chairman of NVDA in place of Keshari. Mishra will continue to hold the charge of ACS (water resources and transport) besides heading NVDA, the sources said. Another senior IAS officer and additional chief secretary (agriculture) Ajit Kesari has been appointed the director general (DG) of the RCPV Naronha Academy of Administration. Kesari will continue to hold the charge of ACS (agriculture), the sources said.

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Senior IAS officer and principal secretary (personnel department) Deepti Gaud Mukherjee will be relieved from the additional charge of the DG, RCPV Naronha Academy of Administration, they said.

In a separate order, the state government has given the additional charge of the legislative affairs department to ACS (general administration) Vinod Kumar, they said. Besides senior IAS officer and principal secretary (finance) Manoj Govil has been promoted to the rank of ACS, the sources added.

Meanwhile, Madhya Pradesh Youth Congress (YC) activists on Thursday locked the main gates of the building housing state's Staff Selection Board (SSB), earlier known as Vyapam, seeking an impartial probe into alleged leak of Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) paper last week. Police said they arrested 20 Youth Congress members and leaders, including their state chief Vikrant Bhuria, who were later released after furnishing securities. The protesting activists alleged they were ill-treated by the police, a charge denied by the law enforcement agency.

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During the protest, the YC activists shouted slogans against Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan over what they claimed leak of the question paper related to TET held on March 25. Assistant Commissioner of Police (MP Nagar) Nagendra Singh Bais denied that the protesters were ill-treated. He said the protesters locked the gates of SSB building and squatted. “We requested them to end their protest at the gates, but when they did not do so, we arrested them,” Bais said.

On March 28, a section of aspirants who wrote the Teacher Eligibility Test demanded that online TET be cancelled after a purported screenshot of the question-cum-answer sheet went viral on social media. The protesters had held placards with the message 'Cancel MP-TET 2022. They had also petitioned officials seeking action.

Vyapam (Vyavsayik Pareeksha Mandal), whose name was recently changed to Madhya Pradesh Karmachari Chayan Aayog (Staff Selection Board), had got embroiled in a controversy due to alleged rigging of exams for medical college admissions and government jobs spanning several years. The scam in Vyapam came to light in 2011. The CBI had taken over the investigation into the mega recruitment and admission scandal after a Supreme Court order in 2015.