New Delhi (02.09.2021): Former Union Home Secretary and the incumbent Chairman and Managing Director of the India Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO) L C Goyal, a retired 1979 batch IAS officer of Kerala, was on Wednesday given a fifth continuous extension that will take him to 2022.
He was appointed the ITPO chief on August 31, 2015. His term was successively extended by a year on August 14, 2017, July 31, 2018, August 22, 2019, and August 31, 2020.
It is often discussed among the senior serving bureaucrats as well as former ones as to what makes Goyal click with the NDA administration?
Goyal is probably the only bureaucrat, outside PMO, who has the most stable and smoothest career (post-retirement) except for his just seven months tenure (ending Sept 2015) as Union Home Secretary.
Maybe the continuity factor accounts for it. Plus the fact that Goyal is seen as a no-nonsense officer with undoubted integrity and who maintains a very low profile. So the Goyal remains where he was put.
Goyal, widely regarded as an upright officer, is heading one of the most ambitious projects in the country of redeveloping the complex meant for exhibiting things in a state-of-the-art International Exhibition-cum-Convention Centre (IECC) which is given to the India Trade Promotion Organization (ITPO).
The project is seen as an aspirational one for PM Modi along with the Central Vista project.
(By Rakesh Ranjan)
