Retired Railway Officer Bhooma VG Named Vice-Chancellor of India-Backed Mauritius Institute
Dr Bhooma VG, a 1987-batch officer of the Indian Railway Personnel Service who retired from the railways, has been selected as Vice-Chancellor of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Public Service and Innovation in Reduit, Moka, Republic of Mauritius, according to an announcement distributed by the Ministry of External Affairs.
AIPSI, earlier known as the Civil Service College, Mauritius, was jointly inaugurated by the Prime Ministers of India and Mauritius in March 2025. The institute is being developed as a premier training agency and a centre of excellence for the African region, with plans for it to eventually function as an awarding body, meaning it would be able to confer its own recognised qualifications rather than merely deliver training modules designed elsewhere. As Vice-Chancellor, Dr Bhooma will oversee the academic direction and administrative functioning of an institution India has positioned as a flagship of its public-service diplomacy in the region, at a campus that has been operating for a little over a year since its inauguration.
Dr Bhooma's career in the Indian Railway Personnel Service spanned postings across Western Railway, South Eastern Railway, South Central Railway, Southern Railway and the Integral Coach Factory, giving her exposure to personnel administration in several of the network's busiest zones. As Divisional Railway Manager at Guntur, she oversaw the complete electrification of the mainline section under her division and steered the shift to e-office systems for administrative work, two initiatives that officers in the service cite as marking her tenure there. The IRPS handles recruitment, training, welfare and personnel administration across Indian Railways, one of the world's largest employers, and officers who rise through it typically combine field postings at divisional level with stints in policy and training roles at the zonal or Board level.
Her selection comes after retirement from active service, following the Ministry of External Affairs' search for a candidate to lead an institution still in its early years of operation. The AIPSI post was filled through a process coordinated between the two governments, reflecting the institute's status as a bilateral project rather than a purely domestic Mauritian appointment. India has in recent years drawn on retired officers with strong administrative and training backgrounds for similar overseas assignments, viewing their operational experience within large Indian government systems as directly relevant to setting up training institutions abroad.
The appointment fits a wider pattern in India's outreach to the African continent, where New Delhi has increasingly used capacity-building and training partnerships as instruments of soft power. Mauritius, with its historical ties to India, has been a recurring site for such initiatives, and the AIPSI project follows earlier Indian-backed training and infrastructure commitments to the island nation, including cooperation in defence, digital infrastructure and civil aviation over the past decade.
For AIPSI itself, the immediate task is building out its academic offerings and administrative systems to match its stated ambitions as a centre of excellence for the region. Converting the institute into a recognised awarding body will require accreditation processes and partnerships that typically take years to establish, and the new Vice-Chancellor's background in large-scale organisational change within the Indian Railways is likely to inform how she approaches that expansion. The institute will also need to build a faculty and curriculum capable of drawing civil servants from across the African continent rather than serving Mauritius alone, a mandate significantly broader than that of the college it replaced.
According to the Ministry of External Affairs' statement, Dr Bhooma is expected to take up her assignment at the Moka campus shortly, with the announcement distributed on August 12, 2026.
