Jyotiraditya Scindia will lead the Civil Aviation Ministry, while Hardeep Puri, who formerly led the Urban Development and Petroleum Ministry, will lead the Urban Development and Petroleum Ministry. Mr. Scindia joined the administration today as part of a reboot of the Union cabinet, which included 36 new ministers, including these two, and seven promotions.
Mr. Scindia, who was born in 1971 and received his education at Harvard and Stanford, has come a long way since his first election as a Congress candidate in 2002, a by-election in the Guna Lok Sabha constituency, which was held after his father, former Civil Aviation Minister Madhavrao Scindia, died in a plane crash.
Madhavrao Scindia and seven others were killed when their private jet, a Beechcraft King Air C90, crashed on the borders of Uttar Pradesh’s Mainpuri region in September 2001.
In March 2020, Mr. Scindia, 50, resigned from the Congress and joined the BJP, setting in motion a series of events that ended in the Kamal Nath administration in Madhya Pradesh collapsing barely 15 months after taking office, clearing the way for the BJP to assume control in the state.
Mr. Puri, the outgoing Civil Aviation Minister, led the government through a difficult period for the business because of the COVID-19 epidemic, which has brought the hospitality and tourism industries to a standstill. Airlines are fighting to stay afloat as flight numbers have plummeted throughout the world.
