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NEW DELHI: Government recruitment agency PESB has rejected all the candidates it interviewed for the job of chief executive officer of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL), marking the third time in recent years that the board has failed to find a suitable candidate for the role at the state-run oil company.
The Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) had interviewed eight candidates, including directors of HPCL and Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL), on June 14 but rejected all of them.
“The Board has not recommended any candidate for the post of Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) of HPCL and has recommended the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas to choose appropriate further action for selection including Search cum Selection Committee (SCSC) or as deemed appropriate with the approval of the competent authority,” the PESB committee said in a notice.
The HPCL CMD post will fall vacant on September 1, 2024, when the incumbent Pushp Kumar Joshi retires at the mandatory retirement age of 60. PESB has so far been unable to find suitable candidates for the top posts at Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and ONGC, which led to the incumbent IOC repeal an additional year after retirement and a retired executive being appointed as head at ONGC.
The Petroleum and Natural Gas Board of India (PESB) interviewed nine candidates (including two sitting IAS officers) for the top post of ONGC, India’s largest oil and gas producer, on June 3, 2021. However, none of the candidates – senior bureaucrats Avinash Joshi and Niraj Varma, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) finance director Pomila Jaspal, or ONGC’s director of technical and field services Om Prakash Singh – were found suitable for the post.
The ministry then set up a search committee and appointed Arun Kumar Singh, who retired from Indian Oil Corp. at 60, to head ONGC. Singh was originally ineligible to apply, but the eligibility criteria were changed to allow people who had reached 60 to be considered. He will serve for three years, until December 2025.
In the case of IOC, the PESB in May last year did not make any recommendation to replace Shrikant Madhav Vaidya, who is due to retire in August 2023 when he turns 60. The committee interviewed 10 candidates, including Chennai Petroleum Corporation managing director Arvind Kumar.
This was followed by an unusual move: Vaidya, who took over as IOC President on July 1, 2020, will be “re-employed on contract basis” for a period of one year “within his date of retirement, i.e., from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2024”, according to an official order dated August 4, 2023.
This month, the Ministry of Petroleum invited candidates for the new IOC chairman. The selection will be made by a three-member selection committee headed by PESB chairman, which also includes petroleum minister and former HPCL chairman MK Surana as a member. Applications have been invited by July 3 from engineers, chartered accountants and cost accountants with a master’s in business administration from a premier institute and at least five years of experience in a leadership position. As per the recruitment advertisement, the age limit for eligibility has been set at 58 years for internal candidates and 57 years for external candidates, with the retirement age set at 60 years.
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