Nirmala Sitharaman will present her seventh budget in July 2024 after being appointed as a finance minister one more time. She has held the top chair in one of the most-coveted ministries since she took over for the first time in 2019. The 64-year-old Sitharaman already has the record for presenting the most number of budgets by any Finance Minister in India since independence. (Image: PTI)
59-year-old Amit Shah, one of Prime Minister Modi's longest aides, will continue as India's Minister for Home Affairs and Cooperation. In his tenure as the Home Minister between 2019 and 2024, Shah led the abrogation of Article 370 (which took away the special status conferred to the state of Jammu and Kashmir), got the Citizenship Amendment Bill passed through the Parliament, and the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill that would allow authorities to collect, store, and analyse physical and biological samples, including retina scans, of prisoners. (Image: PTI)
The 67-year-old Nitin Gadkari was already the longest-serving Minister for Road Transport and Highways, having completed over nine years, before the latest election. The Highway Man of India will continue in his role in the new Narendra Modi cabinet too. Gadkari is credited with the construction of more than 90,000 km of national highways and 30,000 km of new roads in the country in the last 10 years.
The 69-year-old S Jaishankar, the second Indian diplomat to ever take over as the chief of the country's Ministry of External Affairs will continue in his role. He was India's foreign minister from 2019 to 2024 and foreign secretary from 2015 to 2018. Jaishankar is one of the rare technocrats who has become the face of India's foreign policy with his hot takes on multiple bilateral and multilateral issues going viral from time to time. The former Tata Group executive was a key player in Modi administration claiming credit for India's rising force and clout in international politics.
72-year-old Rajnath Singh will continue as India's Defence Minister, a position he has held since 2019. He will get to continue his work on strengthening and modernisation of India's forces as well as the efforts to increase local sourcing of defence equipment, which has led to a sharp rally in defence stocks in recent years. However, one of the policies inititated by the Modi administration during his tenure was the Agnipath programme, a short-term recruitment of youngsters into Indian Army. The scheme has turned out to be very unpopular in many parts of the country. All eyes will be on him to see if he decides to withdraw the Agnipath scheme.
Piyush Goyal, who will be celebrating his 60th birthday on June 13, has been sworn in as a cabinet minister one more time. This is also the first time he won a Lok Sabha seat, from Mumbai North-West, with a margin of over 3.5 lakh votes. He will continue as the minister for commerce and industry, a portfolio he has held since 2019. Pralhad Joshi will succeed Goyal at the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution.
61-year-old Sarbananda Sonowal will continue as the Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways in the Narendra Modi 3.0 cabinet. He was given the ministry in 2021, along with the Ministry of AYUSH , when Modi decided to expand the number of cabinet ministers. This time, Prataprao Jadhav of the Shiv Sena, will head the AYUSH Ministry as a junior minister with independent charge.
63-year-old Jual Oram, who has been elected to the Parliament for five terms from Sundergarh in Odisha, will continue as the chief of a ministry he set up during the first term of the National Democratic Alliance under the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Oram will continue as the Minister of Tribal Affairs. File photo: Feb 28, 2019, IANS/PIB
54-year-old Ashwini Vaishnaw continues as the chief two ministries (Railways and Electronics & Information Technology) that he already held, loses one (Communications) to Jyotiraditya Scindia, and gains a new one in Information Broadcasting.
72-year-old Hardeep Singh Puri will continue as India's oil minister. A seasoned diplomat played a crucial role in securing oil supplies from Russia in the face of extreme pressure from the Western countries led by the US. Puri got the Petroleum and Natural Gas portfolio in the 2021 reshuffle, along with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, which has now gone to Manohar Lal Khattar, a first time minister and the former Chief Minister of Haryana. He will continue to represent India at the COP Summit, the UN Conference aimed at tackling climate change.
53-year-old Kiren Rijiju will continue as the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, a role that would become more crucial in the absence of a full majority for his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for the first time in 10 years. Before the election, Rijiju, a leader from Arunachal Pradesh, was also the cabinet minister for food processing ministry, which has now been shared with an important ally, Chirag Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party from Bihar.