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

“The President, on the recommendation of the selection committee, is pleased to appoint Shri Navneet Kumar Sehgal, IAS (retd) as the chairman of the Prasar Bharati Board with effect from the date of his assuming charge of the post for a term of three years or until he attains the age of seventy years, whichever is earlier,” the order by the ministry of information and broadcasting dated 15 March said.

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.

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Sehgal, a retired IAS officer of the 1988 batch from the Uttar Pradesh cadre, has been closely associated with UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath. He 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.

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.

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.