New Delhi: The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), Mussoorie, has appointed Dr. B. Rajender as its new director. A 1995 batch IAS officer from the Bihar cadre, he took charge on 31 July 2026 on central deputation at the rank of Secretary to the Government of India, taking over the leadership of the country’s premier institution for training civil servants.
Rajender brings a combination of academic expertise and governance experience to head the academy that trains India’s future bureaucrats. He is a scientist by training and an administrator with over three decades of experience across district administration, state government and the centre.
His career began in Bihar with field postings. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1995. His first posting was as assistant magistrate in Munger in 1996. He later served as sub-divisional magistrate in Danapur and Jhanjharpur.
In 1999, he moved to the Personnel and Administrative Reforms Department before beginning a long stint in district administration. He served there for six months before becoming district collector in Dhanbad. He subsequently served in Madhubani, Kaimur, Patna, Saran and West Champaran.
Later, his career became closely associated with agriculture and rural development. Rajender held multiple leadership positions in Bihar’s agriculture department, including Director of Agriculture, Director of Agriculture and Horticulture, Deputy Managing Director of the Bihar State Seeds Corporation and Administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Board.
He subsequently held key positions in Bihar’s finance and social welfare departments. Later, he moved to the centre as Joint Secretary in the Ministries of Water Resources and Agriculture. From 2019 to 2022, he served as Minister of Agriculture at the Indian Embassy in Rome. He represented India in international agricultural cooperation. He returned to Bihar in 2022 as Principal Secretary in the General Administration Department, overseeing personnel and administrative affairs.
A low-profile administrator
Rajender has largely maintained a low public profile, rarely appearing in the media. In a LinkedIn post, IAS officer and Bihar Information & Public Relations Department official Noopur Jha described him as someone who believed in a “nameless, faceless bureaucracy.”
“His belief in a ‘nameless, faceless bureaucracy’ is why it is extremely difficult to know about his work through the media and social networks. So I use the old-fashioned way of speaking to him at length and learning from his way of working,” she added. (Please add the link for this specific post)
Since June 2023, he has held the additional charge of principal secretary in the Labour Department of Bihar. Now, joining LBSNAA, Dr. B. Rajender is the 28th director of the academy, which was established in 1959. The first director of the academy was A.N. Jha, ICS. Over the decades, the academy has been headed by several senior IAS officers, including P.S. Appu, N.C. Saxena, Wajahat Habibullah, Rudhra Gangadharan, Upma Chowdhry, Sanjeev Chopra, Lok Ranjan, Srinivas R. Katikithala, and most recently, Tarinikanti.
The director oversees the training of IAS officers and officers of other services at LBSNAA, helping shape the future leadership of India’s civil services.
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)