The founder of Zoho Corporation, Padma Shri Sridhar Vembu, has been added to the newly reconstituted National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), as per reports by stratnewsglobal.
Vembu based at a village in Tamil Nadu, has been nominated to the NSAB that acts as an advisory body to the revamped and expanded National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) headed by National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval. He will be one of the exceptional talents drawn from the private sector advising the government on issues of national security.
NSAB members normally have a two-year tenure and only a few members from the previous Board have been retained and apart from Vembu former ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan, Anshuman Tripathy from IIM Bangalore and Arun K. Singh, former ambassador to France and the United States have been added to the NSCS.
Tilak Devasher, a Pakistan specialist and former senior intelligence officer, Aloke Joshi, former Chairman of NTRO, Prof. K Kamakoti from IIT Madras, Lt Gen. Subrata Saha (Retd), former Deputy Chief of the Indian Army, Lt Gen SL Narasimhan, a China specialist and head of the MEA’s in-house think tank, Centre for Contemporary China Studies (CCCS), and Bimal Patel, who heads the Ahmedabad based Rashtriya Raksha University have been re-nominated to the NSAB.
NSAB Chairman, diplomat RK Raghavan, India’s former Ambassador to Russia, has ended his term and it is not clear who will head the newly reconstituted body.
Each of the NSAB is an expert in their respective field and is assigned a particular study that is submitted to the NSCS for analysis and then implementation through various ministries.
NSA Ajit Doval who acts at the single-point adviser to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) across six verticals—defence, internal security, strategic (nuclear) matters, space, external affairs and intelligence—receives inputs and advice from the NSAB, the three deputy NSAs and a military adviser who handle different portfolios.
As of now Rajinder Khanna, former head of India’s foreign intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), is deputy NSA looking after space, cyber technology. Former diplomat Pankaj Saran is in charge of strategic and maritime affairs. Former IPS officer Datta Padsalgikar handles the internal security portfolio while Lt Gen VG Khandare (Retd), who headed the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) before his retirement from the Army, is now the Military Adviser in the NSCS, heading the military wing that carries out assessments and analysis on the armed forces.
Click here to subscribe to The Commune on Telegram and get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.