Navneet Sehgal Appointed as Prasar Bharati Board Chairman

Retired bureaucrat Navneet Kumar Sehgal has been appointed as the new chairperson of the Prasar Bharati Board. The position had been vacant for four years after A Surya Prakash retired in February 2020 after turning 70, the upper age limit for the post.

Appointment Process

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Friday chaired a meeting to appoint the chairman of the nation’s public broadcaster. Present at the meeting were Press Council of India chairperson retired Justice Ranjana Desai and information and broadcasting secretary Sanjay Jaju.

About Navneet Sehgal

• Sehgal is a retired IAS officer of the 1988 batch from the Uttar Pradesh cadre.
• He has been closely associated with UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
• Sehgal played a significant role in UP’s global investor summit and hosted MotoGP in Noida last year while serving as the additional chief secretary of sports and youth in the UP government.

Previous Roles

• In 2020, Sehgal was tasked with overseeing the information department following the Hathras rape case.
• In 2022, he was transferred to the sports department.
• In the past, he served as the information secretary in the then-Mayawati-led government from 2007 to 2012.
• In 2013, Sehgal was appointed as principal secretary in the then Akhilesh Yadav-led government during the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and also oversaw the Lucknow-Agra Expressway project.

About Prasar Bharati

• Prasar Bharati is India’s largest public broadcasting agency.
• It was established by the Prasar Bharati Act of 1990, which came into effect in 1997.
• The agency includes Doordarshan Television Network and All India Radio, previously part of the information and broadcasting ministry.
• On March 13, Prasar Bharati launched PB-SHABD, a news-sharing service for registered entities to access news feeds from its network of reporters.

The appointment of Navneet Sehgal as the new Prasar Bharati Board Chairman fills a crucial vacancy and is expected to bring new leadership to India’s public broadcasting agency.