* Sonowal and Scindia get Cabinet berths; 12 ministers exit
NEW DELHI: In the first reshuffle of his Council of Ministers on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inducted Sarbananda Sonowal, Narayan Rane, Jyotiraditya Scindia and others in the Cabinet. In the process, he dropped 12 ministers, including Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar.
Fifteen Cabinet ministers and 28 Ministers of State, including novices and those elevated, were sworn in at a ceremony in the Darbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Rajya Sabha MP from Maharashtra Narayan Rane was the first to take the oath. He was followed by Sarbananda Sonowal.
Congress-turned-BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia, a Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh, also took oath as a Cabinet minister. The 50-year-old leader was Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power and Union Minister of State for Commerce & Communications in the earlier UPA government.
Kiren Rijiju, R K Singh, Hardeep Singh Puri, Mansukh Mandaviya, Parshottam Rupala, G Kishan Reddy and Anurag Thakur were elevated to the Cabinet-level.
Twenty-eight Ministers of State, including seven from Uttar Pradesh, took the oath.
They are Pankaj Choudhary, Anupriya Patel, Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma, Kaushal Kishore, SP S Baghel and Ajay Kumar. B L Verma, a Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh, was also sworn in as a Minister of State.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Shobha Karandlaje, MPs from Karnataka; Darshana Vikram Jardosh from Gujarat; Lok Sabha MP Meenakshi Lekhi from New Delhi; Annapurna Devi (Jharkhand), A Narayanaswamy (Karnataka); Ajay Bhatt (Uttarakhand), Chauhan Devusinh (Gujarat), were also sworn in as Ministers of State.
Others who took oath as Ministers of State were Bhagwanth Khutba (Karnataka); Kapil Moreshwar Patil (Maharashtra); Pratima Bhoumik (Tripura); Subhas Sarkar (West Bengal); Bhagwat Kishanrao Karad (Maharashtra); Rajkumar Ranjan Singh (Manipur); MPs Bharati Pawar (Maharashtra), Bishweswar Tudu (Odisha) and Shantanu Thakur (West Bengal) Munjapara Mahendrabhai (Gujarat), John Barla and Nisith Pramanik (West Bengal); and BJP's Tamil Nadu state president L Murugan. (Agencies)