S Gopalakrishnan, a senior Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer, has been appointed as additional secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office. Gopalakrishnan’s appointment was cleared by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday.
IAS officer S Gopalakrishnan has been appointed as additional secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet
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The 1991 batch IAS officer is currently serving at the ministry of electronics where his responsibilities include issues related to e-governance, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, startups and innovation.
Gopalakrishnan is an electrical engineering graduate from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a postgraduate from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He also holds a masters degree in development studies from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
The ACC order issued on Friday also cleared the appointment of Bihar cadre IAS officer C Sridhar as a joint secretary and Himachal Pradesh cadre IAS officer Meera Mohanty as a director at the PMO. Sridhar, a 2001 batch officer with a post-graduate in agriculture with specialisation in genetics and plant breeding, is a senior deputy director at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration at Mussoorie, colloquially referred to as the IAS academy. Meera Mohanty is serving at the Cabinet Secretariat.
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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