Govt disbands board of Indira Gandhi Centre for Arts, names new Chief

After Nehru Memorial Society, the Modi government on Thursday reconstituted the management of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) bringing in veteran Hindi journalist Ram Bahadur Rai as its head in place of Chinmaya Gharekhan, a former diplomat.

The appointment of Rai, a former news editor of Hindi daily Jansatta, as the President of the 20-member Board of Trustees of IGNCA, was announced by the Culture Ministry.

IGNCA, considered a Congress legacy, was established in 1987 when Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister as a centre for research, academic pursuit and dissemination in the field of the arts. Gharekhan was appointed during the UPA-I rule.

The reconstituted trust of IGNCA, an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture, will be functional with immediate effect, an official statement said. Besides Rai, the Board comprises 19 other members including classical dancers Sonal Mansingh and Padma Subrahmaniam, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and artist Vasudeo Kamath.

The other members of the Board are Chandraprakash Dwivedi, Nitin Desai, K Arvinda Rao, Bharat Gupta, ex-chairman Khadi Village Industries Commission(KVIC) Mahesh Chandra Sharma, M Seshan, Rati Vinay Jha, Nirmala Sharma, Harsh Neotia, Saryu Doshi, DP Sinha and Viraj Yagnik.

The Board also has Culture secretary, additional secretary and financial advisor of Culture Ministry and member secretary, IGNCA as trustees. Padma Subrahmaniam is the only member in the outgoing Board of Trustees who has been retained. Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma termed the revamp of the IGNCA management as something “not done for the first time” and noted similar steps were taken in 2000, 2004 and 2007.

“See it’s a continuous process. Change is a continuous process. As a part of that, this change has been brought,” Sharma said.