Senior scientist Rajesh Gera has been appointed as the Director-General, National Informatics Centre (NIC), according to a Personnel Ministry order. Gera is currently Deputy Director-General in the NIC.
The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved the appointment of Gera, Scientist ‘G’, to the post of Director-General, NIC, it said. The NIC, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), was established in 1976 with the objective to provide technology-driven solutions to central and state governments.
“With the resolve to continue its march to deliver technology-driven solutions and provide eGovernance support to the Government of India, Dr. Neeta Verma passed the baton to Rajesh Gera, the newly appointed Director-General, NIC,” NIC said in a LinkedIn post.
Verma had been associated with NIC since the year 2016 as the Director-General. During her tenure at NIC, she spearheaded the development of digital platforms for various initiatives of the Government of India under the ‘Digital India Program’.
She had been an active proponent of leading citizen engagement through technology-led government initiatives at various levels of governance. She was instrumental in setting up the technology platform for MyGov, which is a citizen engagement and crowdsourcing platform engaging over one crore citizens.
It was under her leadership that NIC launched an open data platform to release government data in open for the public good. At NIC, she led the establishment of one of its kinds Centres of Excellence in Blockchain, Application Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Analytics. She has also played a key role in setting up NIC CERT (Cyber emergency response team) in 2017.