By IANS,
New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Tuesday forwarded to President Pratibha Patil a list of 13 people to be appointed as members of his council of ministers. It includes new faces like Jayanthi Natarajan, who gets environment and forests, Rajiv Shukla, who will be minister of state for parliamentary affairs, and Milind Deora, who will be minister of state for communications and IT.
In the long awaited reshuffle, Salman Khursheed gets law from M. Veerappa Moily, who has been made corporate affairs minister, Jairam Ramesh has been elevated from minister of state for environment to cabinet minister for rural development while Trinamool Congress leader Dinesh Trivedi takes over as railway minister.
Beni Prasad Verma, who was minister of state for steel with independent charge, has been elevated as cabinet minister in charge of the same ministry. The other new cabinet minister is V. Kishore Chandra Deo, who will take care of tribal affairs and Panchayati Raj.
IUML’s E. Ahamed is minister of state for external affairs and human resource development.
Congress leader Murli Deora has been dropped as corporate affairs minister. Instead, his son, Milind Deora, has come in.
The others, whose resignations have been forwarded with the recommendation that they be accepted, are DMK’s Dayanidhi Maran as well as M.S. Gill, B.K. Handique, Kanti Lal Bhuria, A. Sai Prathap and Arun S. Yadav.
The ministers will be sworn in at 5 p.m. by the president.