KATHMANDU :Chief Secretary Lok Darshan Regmi has resigned from his post. With the resignation of Regmi as the Chief Secretary nearly half a month prior to the end of his five-year tenure, Foreign Secretary Shanker Das Bairagi is likely to receive the appointment to the senior-most post of the bureaucracy.
According to a source at the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli approved the resignation on Thursday. The cabinet meeting today is likely to appoint Foreign Secretary as the new Chief Secretary of the country, according to the source.
Mohan Krishna Sapkota and Kedar Bahadur Adhikari are other secretaries who are also in the race to become the Chief Secretary. If Regmi had decided to continue serving his full term, all three secretaries would have retired from the civil service.
Bairagi’s long administrative leadership in Foreign Services
The government had provided the role of officiating the Foreign Secretary after the then Foreign Secretary Arjun Bahadur Thapa retired from the post on January 14, 2014. Bairagi has been leading the administration of Nepal’s Foreign Services since 2014. Due to a provision of the Civil Services Act of 1993 that requires at least five years experience as a joint secretary to become a secretary, Bairagi could not make it to the post of the Foreign Secretary immediately. He was promoted as the Foreign Secretary from his officiating status only in October 2015.
Before arriving at the Foreign Ministry to serve in a leadership role, he worked as the ambassador and Permanent Representative of Nepal to the United Nations Office in Geneva. He had previously worked as a Deputy Chief of Mission at Nepal’s Mission to UN in New York prior to his role in Geneva.
Bairagi also has experience working in Nepal’s embassy to India and Australia, as well as in a Nepali mission to the European Union. Chinese President Xi Jinping had made his first official trip to Nepal after Bairagi began to lead the administration of the Foreign Ministry, an event that is interpreted as a milestone in Nepal-China relations.
Additionally, foreign policy experts say that Nepal’s relations with the US, Japan and South Korea, among other countries, have further improved and expanded in the last few years. Despite souring relations between Nepal and India at the political level, the ties between two neighboring countries at the administrative level have remained normal.
It was also under Bairagi’s leadership that the two countries held their Joint Oversight Mechanisms meeting recently that marked the end of a long drought of formal dialogues between two countries for months.
