Janardan Prasad has been appointed as the new Director General of the Geological Survey of India (GSI), an official said.
Prasad, who took charge of the 174-year-old institution on Thursday, succeeds Dr S Raju, who held the post since 2020.
Prasad is an MSc in Geology from Patna University and joined GSI, Gandhinagar, as a geologist in 1988.
He was also posted in Shillong, Patna, Faridabad, Ranchi and Hyderabad in various capacities.
Before this assignment, he was posted as the Additional Director General and Head of the Department (ADG & HoD) of the southern region since June 2020 and was also chairman of the technical-cum- cost committee (TCC), National Mineral Exploration Trust, New Delhi.
Prasad is experienced in metallogeny and mineral exploration studies and has been part of extensive mineral exploration work in Saurashtra and other areas of Gujarat in commodities like limestone, gold, base metal, PGE and bauxite.
Incidentally, he was part of the Justice MB Shah Commission for inquiry into illegal mining of iron and manganese in Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, where the central and state governments were incurring huge revenue loss.
The GSI, an attached office to the Ministry of Mines, is headquartered in the city and has six regional offices in Lucknow, Jaipur, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Shillong and Kolkata.