Pathak, a 1979-batch officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, was till now posted as the Special DG of the 2.5-lakh personnel strong force here and was also officiating as the DG for sometime.
The post of the Border Security Force chief has been vacant for the last one month after Subhash Joshi retired on February 28.
Before coming to BSF, Pathak had served in another paramilitary CRPF as its chief of operations in Jammu and Kashmir and he has also spent stints in various positions in his cadre states of Assam and Meghalaya.
The BSF guards two of India's most crucial borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh and it is also deployed extensively for conducting anti-Naxal operations in Chhattisgarh and Odisha besides rendering various tasks in the internal security domain of the country.