"The appointment for the director at NMML will be announced soon after Raksha Bandhan... Shakti Sinha will be selected as the new director of the premier institution," a source in the Culture Ministry said.
Controversy erupted over the appointment of NMML director after a prominent member of its Executive Council (EC) Pratap Bhanu Mehta quit allegedly over shortlisting of Sinha, who reportedly until a few days ago was a director in India Foundation, a think tank aligned to RSS.
Another member of the selection committee Prasar Bharti Chairman A Surya Prakash is also on the India Foundation Board, which also included senior BJP leader Ram Madhav, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha.
A strong dissenting voice also came from Nitin Desai, economist and former Under Secretary General of the UN, at a meeting last week over two names -- Sinha and Indira Gandhi National Open University academic Kapil Kumar.
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The post of director at NMML is lying vacant since last year after UPA appointee Mahesh Rangarajan stepped down after the ruling NDA described his appointment as "illegal and unethical".
An IAS officer of 1979 batch from AGMUT cadre, Sinha was considered as a highly influential joint secretary in Vajpayee's PMO in the late 1990s. He had also served as private secretary to Vajpayee.
The advertisement issued for the director's post is also reportedly been modified at the last moment to accommodate Sinha.
Established in the memory of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, NMML is an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture.
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