New Delhi: The central government is set to name economist and BJP legislator Ashok Kumar Lahiri as vice-chairman and scientist Gobardhan Das as a member of the policy think tank NITI Aayog. This decision emerges shortly before the concluding round of West Bengal’s assembly elections on April 29.
Although no official notifications have been released, a senior government source informed ThePrint that Lahiri, the current BJP representative from Balurghat in West Bengal, will succeed the outgoing vice-chairman Suman Berry, whose term ends on May 1 after four years. Das, who ran as a BJP candidate in the 2021 state polls, will join as a member.
An unnamed secretary-level official in the central government raised concerns about the timing of the information release. ‘What prompted the rush to share this with the media late at night? The government might have held off until official announcements,’ the official remarked.
These selections occur amid a closely contested race in West Bengal, where Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress administration faces strong opposition from the BJP.
The initial voting phase on April 23 saw a 92 percent participation rate. Constituencies linked to Lahiri and Das—Balurghat and Purbasthali Uttar—will vote in the upcoming second phase on April 29.
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Background on Lahiri and Das
Lahiri, a prominent economist, held the position of chief economic adviser from 2002 to 2007, serving under governments led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.
Previously a faculty member at the Delhi School of Economics, he has also been part of the 15th Finance Commission, chaired Bandhan Bank, served as executive director at the Asian Development Bank, worked as a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund, and consulted for the World Bank.
The BJP nominated Lahiri for the Balurghat seat in South Dinajpur ahead of the 2021 elections. He secured victory against Trinamool Congress candidate Sekhar Dasgupta by over 13,000 votes but opted out of running this year.
Das, an immunologist, departed from the BJP in 2023—two years following his defeat in Purbasthali Uttar in North Bardhaman—to become director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Bhopal.
Prior to politics, he was a professor and chair at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Special Centre for Molecular Medicine. Amid the Covid-19 crisis, he actively promoted on social platforms the potential of the BCG vaccine—used against tuberculosis—as a preventive measure for the virus.
Das is connected to the Molecular Immunology Forum and has earned awards such as the Tata Innovation Fellowship in 2023 and fellowship from the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bengaluru in 2018.
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