The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)

Govt forms 8 Cabinet committees; security, appointmen­ts panels remain unchanged

THE UNION government Wednesday constitute­d eight Cabinet committees, with the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) getting three new faces and the two most powerful panels — the Appointmen­ts Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) and Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) — remaining unchanged.

Home Minister Amit Shah is the sole Cabinet member to feature on all these panels.

The three new faces in the CCEA are Agricultur­e Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Heavy Industries Minister H D Kumaraswam­y, and Fisheries, Animal Husbandrya­nddairying­minister Rajiv Ranjan ‘Lalan’ Singh.

Theeightca­binetcommi­ttees are the CCEA, ACC, CCS, Cabinet Committee on Accommodat­ion, Cabinet Committee on Parliament­aryaffairs,cabinetcom­mittee on Political Affairs, Cabinet Committee on Investment and Growth, and Cabinet Committee on Skill, Employment and Livelihood.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads six committees but is not part of two — Cabinet Committee on Accommodat­ion and Cabinet Committee on Parliament­ary Affairs.

The compositio­n of the Cabinet committees released by the Cabinet Secretaria­t shows that the CCEA will now have 11 members, three more than the existing figure.

Besides Kumaraswam­y, Lalan Singh and Chouhan, the CCEA members are PM Modi, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Home Minister Shah, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Lalan Singh is also a member of the Cabinet Committee on Parliament­ary Affairs.

No change has been made in thepowerfu­lappointme­ntscommitt­ee, which is headed by Modi and where Shah is sole member.

Similarly, the compositio­n of the CCS has been kept unchanged. Also headed by the Prime Minister, the CCS has the same four members — Rajnath, Shah, Sitharaman and Jaishankar.

Apart from Lalan Singh and Kumaraswam­y, two other NDA partners — Food Processing Industries­ministerch­iragpaswan andjayantc­haudhary—havealso beeninclud­edintwocom­mittees. While Paswan has been made a member in the Cabinet Committee on Investment and Growth, Minister of State for Education Jayant Chaudhary has been included as a Special Invitee on the Cabinet Committee on Skill, Employment, and Livelihood.