SRINAGAR: Senior IAS officer Atal Dulloo has been appointed as the new chief secretary of Jammu and Kashmir, replacing the incumbent chief secretary Arun Kumar Mehta, who is retiring on Thursday.
Dulloo, a native of Jammu and Kashmir, will be the first native chief secretary of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Union Territory (UT) after the bifurcation of erstwhile the J&K state into two UTs on August 5, 2019. The last J&K native who worked as J&K chief secretary was B R Sharma from 2015-2017. Before his elevation to the top bureaucracy post in J&K, the Central government had on November 20 repatriated Dulloo to his UT cadre.
Dulloo, a 1989-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory cadre, was serving as secretary, Department of Border Management, under the home ministry before his repatriation to J&K Union Territory. A seasoned bureaucrat, Dulloo had held various assignments in J&K in the past few decades.