Modi cabinet reshuffle: 9 new faces in, 4 old hands elevated

New Delhi: Nine new faces took oath as new members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's council of ministers while three ministers were elevated to cabinet rank on Sunday morning at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The suspense continues on who will get what portfolio.

This is the third cabinet reshuffle since the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power in 2014. 

As the day began, the first to take oath as a cabinet minister was Dharmedra Pradhan, who was the minister of state, handling oil and natural gas. Other ministers of state to take oath as cabinet ministers were Piyush Goyal, Nirmala Sitharaman and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. 

The new inductees in Modi's ministry are: RK Singh (Lok Sabha MP from Arrah, Bihar), Hardeep Singh Puri (ex-diplomat), Shiv Pratap Shukla (Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh), Satyapal Singh (Lok Sabha MP from Baghpat), Alphons Kannanthanam (ex-bureaucrat), Ashwini Kumar Choubey (Lok Sabha MP from Buxar, Bihar), Anant Kumar Dattatreya Hegde (Lok Sabha MP from Uttara Kannada), Gajendra Singh Shekhawat (Lok Sabha MP from Jodhpur), andVirendra Kumar (Lok Sabha MP from Tikamgarh, Madhya Pradesh). 

Ahead of the oath ceremony, PM Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah met the new minsters for breakfast. PM Modi is scheduled to leave for BRICS summit in the port city Xiamen in China.

The latest portfolio reshuffle has been done keeping in view the Lok Sabha elections 2019.

Ahead of the rejig, several ministers including Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Sanjiv Kumar Balyan, Faggan Singh Kulaste and Mahendra Nath Pandey, Kalraj Mishra had resigned.The ministers' performance were graded based on a Positve and Negative formula.