Veteran bureaucrat Praveen Pardeshi made Chief Economic Advisor to Maharashtra CM

Mumbai: In a strategic move, veteran bureaucrat Praveen Pardeshi has been appointed as Chief Economic Advisor to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, which the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi described as “infiltration” by Devendra Fadnavis into the Finance and Planning Ministry headed by NCP’s Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar.

His mandate includes preparation of Maharashtra's Vision 2047 and making the state a trillion-dollar economy.

In the history of Maharashtra, there has been no such post in the Maharashtra CM office, that too headed by a former IAS officer.

As CEA to the Maharashtra CM, he will hold the rank of Minister of State.

As of now, Pardeshi is also the CEO of Maharashtra Institution of Transformation, which had been set up when Eknath Shinde was the CM — on the lines of NITI Aayog.

Pardeshi is also the Chairperson of Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee, the civic panel that oversees the conservation of heritage structures and heritage precincts in the city.

A nature lover, Pardeshi is also the President of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), the oldest and biggest NGO of the country.

Pardeshi is a 1985 IAS batch officer who served as the Principal and Additional Chief Secretary to Fadnavis between 2014 and 2019, when he became the CM for the first time.

After that, he became the Municipal Commissioner of BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) from where he was shunted out by the then Maha Vikas Aghadi government headed by Uddhav Thackeray.

As District Collector, he was the Latur Project Manager of the Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Programme (MEERP) after the earthquake.

From February 2001 to November 2001, Pardeshi worked as a Programme Manager for the UNDP in Gujarat.

Pardeshi has held various senior leadership positions within the United Nations as the Chief of Transition Recovery Unit, UNDP Geneva, and Senior Coordinator of United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR).

NCP (SP) MLA Rohit Pawar has criticised the decision of the MahaYuti-NDA government. “The Chief Minister has in a way infiltrated Ajit Pawar by creating the post of Chief Economic Advisor to the Chief Minister with the status of a Minister of State. Henceforth, all the policy decisions of the Finance Department and, alternatively, all the administrative decisions will also come under the jurisdiction of the Chief Minister through the Chief Economic Advisor. After reviewing the decisions taken in the last two and a half years, he first infiltrated Eknath Shinde's departments and now it is Ajit Pawar’s turn,” said Rohit Pawar.

“Since the current Chief Minister has always had a tendency towards authoritarianism, he has emphasised on keeping every ministry under his direct or indirect control and the decision to appoint a Chief Economic Advisor is also part of the same function. In a democracy, decentralisation of power and teamwork have always yielded better results than centralised power, so it would be in the interest of Maharashtra for the Chief Minister to change his working methods,” he added.