CM and PM's men among 11 promoted to IAS

Gandhinagar: Sanjay Bhavsar, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's close aides and chief minister Anandiben Patel's close aide J D Desai, along with nine other Gujarat Administrative Service (GAS) cadre officers, have been promoted to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) by the Government of India.
UPSC's departmental promotion committee reviewed the recommendations of these 11 officials on March 21, and promoted them in just 10 days.
The one-year early promotion of these two political aides was criticised by other GAS officers. Usually, Gujarat government makes nomination recommendations in July and the UPSC committee visits the state around November-December for the formalities. This time, the state government recommended these names from the state cadre in February and the UPSC committee visited Gandhinagar on March 21.
It is clear that this is an especially early, out-of-turn promotion of two politically well connected GAS officers. The others promoted to the IAS are B A Shah, D K Parekh, A B Gor, M I Patel, V J Rajput, D H Shah, B P Chauhan, S M Khatana and R R Raval. D K Parekh is energy minister Saurabh Patel's personal secretary (PS) while D H Shah is PS to transport minister and state BJP president Vijay Rupani.