Gujarat IAS officer Hardik Satishchandra Shah is PM Modi’s top aide

Hardik Satishchandra Shah will take over as private secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Updated on: Jul 30, 2020, 20:50:28 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Hardik Satishchandra Shah, a 2010 batch IAS officer has been appointed private secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Shah’s appointment was cleared by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet on Thursday, an order by the department of personnel and training said.

PM Narendra Modi-led Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has cleared the appointment of Gujarat cadre Hardik Satishchandra Shah as his new private secretary. (ANI)

Shah, a Gujarat cadre IAS officer, is serving as deputy secretary in the PMO.

Hardik Satishchandra Shah will take over from Rajeev Topno.

Topno, a 1996 batch IAS officer, was appointed as senior advisor to the World Bank Executive Director in June. He is expected to proceed to Washington for his new assignment after 15 August.

Topno, also a Gujarat cadre officer, had spent 11 years in the Prime Minister’s Office, first as a deputy secretary in 2009 when Manmohan Singh had just started his second term. PM Modi continued with him, appointing him to his personal staff.

Hardik Satishchandra Shah’s first assignment at the Centre was in 2017 when he joined as private secretary to environment minister Anil Madhav Dave. He continued in the environment minister’s personal office after Prakash Javadekar came in before finally moving to the PMO in 2019

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
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.Read More

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