Rajesh Kumar Rajora Appointed Director General, RCVP Noronha Academy of Administration & Management

Senior IAS officer Rajesh Kumar Rajora has been appointed Director General of the RCVP Noronha Academy of Administration & Management in Bhopal, according to a Madhya Pradesh government order.

The academy, named after a former Chief Secretary of the state, trains officers of Madhya Pradesh's civil service cadre and conducts induction as well as mid-career training programmes for the state's administrative machinery. It functions as the primary institutional pipeline through which the state's future collectors, secretaries and department heads receive formal training beyond their initial civil service academy instruction.

The Director General's post carries responsibility for shaping the curriculum through which the state's future administrators are trained, including coordination with national training institutions such as the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration on syllabus alignment and faculty exchange for specific modules.

Postings to head state administrative training academies are typically given to senior officers nearing or at the top of the IAS hierarchy, reflecting the institution's role in shaping how incoming and serving officers are prepared for administrative responsibility across departments.

The academy also conducts specialised training programmes for officers of the state police service, forest service and other allied cadres, in addition to its core IAS training mandate, and periodically hosts modules for officers from neighbouring states under inter-state training arrangements coordinated by the Department of Personnel and Training at the central level.

State administrative academies of this kind have increasingly incorporated modules on e-governance, disaster management and public financial management into their core curriculum in recent years, reflecting the changing demands placed on district-level administration, and the incoming Director General's priorities for the academy's training focus are likely to be shaped by these broader trends across state training institutions.

Rajora's appointment comes in the same period as a broader reshuffle of senior IAS officers in Madhya Pradesh following Ashok Barnwal's appointment as the state's Chief Secretary, a reorganisation that has touched secretariat postings, a divisional commissionership and six district collectorships in a single administrative exercise.

The order did not specify Rajora's immediately preceding posting, though appointments to head training academies are frequently drawn from officers who have themselves handled multiple secretariat and field postings, giving them a practical basis for shaping training content around real administrative scenarios.