Rajeev Topno, private secretary to PM Modi, gets World Bank assignment
Rajeev Topno’s next assignment was cleared by the PM Modi-led Appointments Committee of the Cabinet on Thursday. The committee also cleared names of five other officers for foreign assignments.
Rajeev Topno, the 1996 batch IAS officer who has served as a key aide to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been appointed as senior advisor to the World Bank Executive Director.
Rajeev Topno, the 1996 batch IAS officer as served as private secretary to PM Modi for six years. (File photo)
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
Topno’s next assignment was cleared by the PM Modi-led Appointments Committee of the Cabinet on Thursday. The committee also cleared names of five other officers for foreign assignments.
Topno, a Gujarat cadre Indian Administrative Service officer, had joined the Prime Minister’s Office as a deputy secretary in 2009 when Manmohan Singh had just started his second term. He handled key portfolios such as telecom and ports at the PMO in the UPA-2 government.
The prime minister, according to convention, has two private secretaries. One of them is an IAS officer, the second, Vivek Kumar, is an Indian Foreign Service officer.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
{{^usCountry}}
The ACC has also cleared the appointment of 1999 batch IAS officer Brajendra Navnit as Ambassador and India’s permanent representative to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.
{{/usCountry}}
{{#usCountry}}
The ACC has also cleared the appointment of 1999 batch IAS officer Brajendra Navnit as Ambassador and India’s permanent representative to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.
{{/usCountry}}
Ravi Kota, a 1993 batch IAS officer, has been appointed Minister (Economic) at the Indian Embassy in Washington, Lekhan Thakkar, Central Secretariat Service as Counsellor Economic at the embassy in Beijing, H Atheli as advisor to ED, Asian Development Bank. Anwar Hussain Shaik, an Indian Railway Traffic Service officer, has been appointed Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of India to WTO, Geneva.
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.
Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.
Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.
