While the government is tight-lipped about sudden repatriation to Kerala cadre, it is believed that Nitin Agarwal was relieved from BSF charge due to increased infiltration in the Jammu sector. The international border in Jammu and Kashmir and parts of LoC are guarded by the BSF.
The Appointments Committee of the cabinet also relieved special director general Yogesh Khurania from the BSF. He has been appointed as the Odisha director general of police.
Khurania, a 1990 batch IPS officer of Odisha cadre, replaces Arun Sarangi as the new Odisha top cop. The decision to send him back to Odisha comes in wake of the BSF facing challenges in Jammu and Kashmir in wake of rising terror incidents.
Khurania is on a two-day visit to the Jammu frontier where he reviewed the security situation in the region. The meeting took place in the wake of the perceived threat of cross-border infiltration along the International Border (IB) in the Jammu frontier.
Khurania chaired a security review meeting attended by the IG BSF Jammu, IG BSF Kashmir, and senior officers of the Jammu frontier, during which the situation was thoroughly reviewed.
On the other hand, Nitin Agarwal, a Kerala cadre IPS officer of 1989 batch, took charge as the new Director General of the Border Security Force in June last year. He had replaced Pankaj Kumar Singh, who retired on December 31, 2022. Central Reserve Police Force DG Sujoy Lal Thaosen led BSF in an additional capacity since Singh's retirement.
In another development, Union minister of state for home Nityanand Rai informed the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that a total of 10,145 posts are vacant in the Border Security Force (BSF) till July 1 this year.
BSF director general Nitin Agarwal (left) and special DG Yogesh Khurania
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Out of the 10,145 vacant posts in the BSF, 387 are for Gazetted Officers (GOs) in Group 'A'; 1,816 are for Subordinate Officers (SOs) in Group 'B', and 7,942 are for Other Ranks (ORs) in Group 'C'.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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Home/India News/Centre sends BSF DG Nitin Agarwal, special DG Yogesh Khurania back to their parent cadres
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