The Centre on Wednesday extended the tenure of the director of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Praveen Sood. The extension is for a year. He was due to retire on May 24 this year. This is his second term in office. Sood had also been granted a one-year extension in May last year. He was appointed CBI director in May 2023 for a two-year term, when he was serving as Karnataka DGP. The selection committee was headed by Prime Minister (PM) Modi and comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi. Based on the recommendations of the selection committee, the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC), approved Sood’s extension for a period of one year beyond May 24, 2026, an order issued by the Personnel Ministry said.
Praveen Sood, 61, is a 1986-batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the Karnataka cadre. Rahul Gandhi has issued a strong dissent note on the process of for selecting the CBI director and told he did not want to be part of a “biased exercise”.
R K Raghavan, former CBI director was the first to have been appointed for a fixed two-year tenure. He took over as the head of the federal probe agency on January 4, 1999.
