Uttarakhand’s newly-inducted Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat on Friday expanded his Cabinet. Governor Baby Rani Maurya administered the oath to 11 new ministers. With the new ministers sworn in, 11 out of 12 Cabinet posts have been filled. The only vacant seat was the one held by Prakash Pant who died in June 2019.

Among the ministers who took oath are Banshidhar Bhagat, Satpal Maharaj, Harak Singh Rawat, Subodh Uniyal, Yashpal Arya, Dhan Singh Rawat, Bishan Singh Chufal, Arvind Pandey, Ganesh Joshi, Rekha Arya and Yatishwarananda.

Earlier during the day, Bharatiya Janata Party state in-charge Dushyant Gautam had said that the names of the ministers were up for discussion in the party’s parliamentary board meeting in Delhi, ANI reported.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Tirath Singh Rawat had taken oath as the chief minister of Uttarakhand on Wednesday, a day after Trivendra Singh Rawat resigned. He is currently the BJP MP from Pauri Garhwal constituency and a national secretary of the party. He was the chief of the saffron party in Uttarakhand between 2013 and 2015 and has served as an MLA from Chaubattakhal constituency from 2012 to 2017.

State BJP unit gets a new chief

Meanwhile, the BJP effected a change in its organisational structure in the state too, as its Haridwar MLA Madan Kaushik became the party’s new president of the Uttarakhand unit. Kaushik replaced Kaladhungi MLA Bansidhar Bhagat on the post, ANI reported.

The overhaul in BJP started after Tirath Singh Rawat took oath as the new chief minister of the hill state on Wednesday. The development came amid speculation that the party wanted a change in the state’s leadership after complaints from MLAs about the chief minister’s “style of governance”.