Lok Sabha Secretary-General Utpal Kumar Singh, former IAS officer, has been given the additional charge as the CEO of Sansad TV. During his stint in Uttarakhand, Singh had been a key architect of the Kedarnath development project and was credited to have helped rebuild the temple town after it was ravaged by floods in 2013.
In 2017, during a visit to Kedarnath, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of five reconstruction projects at Kedarpuri area, which encompasses the Kedarnath shrine.
Singh was tasked with the project along with Rudraprayag DM Mangesh Ghildiyal. Their work caught the PM’s eye, a government official told The Indian Express. The PM would frequently visit the area for reviewing the projects and interact with the two officers.
Both the officers ended up with prime posts. While Singh later went on to become the Lok Sabha Secretary-General, Ghildiyal was appointed as the under-secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
Before his current top position in the Lok Sabha Secretariat, the 1986-batch Uttarakhand cadre officer served in several key roles at the state and central levels. Singh served as the Uttarakhand Chief Secretary from October 2017 until his retirement in July 2020. That August, he was appointed the Secretary of Lok Sabha Secretariat and later became its Secretary-General.
Singh, 65, who hails from Bihar, got his master’s in History in Delhi University and went on to get another master’s in Public Policy and Management in the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands. He started his career as a civil servant as the sub-district magistrate of Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah.
Political leaders and former bureaucrats, who have worked with Singh, call him “a man of few words”. He was close to former Uttarakhand chief minister General BC Khanduri and had served as his principal secretary. Singh had also served as the secretary in the state’s different departments between 2005 and 2012.
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In 2012, he was deputed to the Centre as the additional secretary in the Union Ministry of Agriculture.
In 2016, he was called back to Uttarakhand by the Congress government under Chief Minister Harish Rawat to serve as the Chief Secretary.
But, sources said, Singh had then “declined” the post. The Congress government was reeling under a crisis following several party leaders’ defections to the BJP.
Subsequently, IAS officer S Ramaswamy became the Chief Secretary, but his term was cut short in 2017 when the BJP swept to power by clinching the Assembly polls with Trivendra Singh Rawat taking charge as the new CM.
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A former state official said the BJP government was not keen on retaining Ramaswamy as the Chief Secretary. “Ramaswamy was relieved from the post and made the chairman of the Revenue Board, though he was to retire in a few months. As Utpal Singh was relieved from his post at the Centre, he returned to work in the state for the next three years as the new Chief Secretary. He was an accessible bureaucrat to everyone,” he said.
Apart from Uttarakhand, Singh had worked as a civil servant in Azamgarh, Muzaffarnagar, Jhansi and Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh for varying tenures. He has also served as the secretary and principal secretary to the Chief Minister and in the Departments of Home, Public Works, Energy, Tourism, and Higher Education, among others. It was during his tenure as the Chief Secretary that the Char Dham highway project was challenged in the Supreme Court in 2019.