Piyush Goyal took charge as the Railway Minister on Monday, reported ANI. The Former Power minister was elevated to cabinet rank and given charge of the Railway Ministry after the cabinet reshuffle that took place on Sunday. He replaced Suresh Prabhu who had offered to resign from the railway ministry after a series of train accidents in the country. Goyal is considered among the top performers in the Modi government. He was the Minister of State (MoS) with independent charge for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy. His work in improving power generation capacity of Coal India, especially in the renewable energy sector has been widely lauded. Under his charge, since 2014, the number of villages in the country that have still not electrified has reportedly come down from over 18,000 to 4,000. He also claimed to have added another 60 GW capacity in his tenure of two years as compared to the addition of 240 GW in last 65 years. In July 2016, during the second cabinet reshuffle of the Narendra Modi ministry, Piyush Goyal took over as the Minister of Mines (Minister of State with Independent charge) from Narendra Singh Tomar.
Goyal has had a strong academic record. A rank holder Chartered Accountant, he has also served on the Board of India’s largest commercial bank, State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda.

Meanwhile, nine new faces were inducted in the Cabinet as Ministers of State, including Ashwini Kumar Choubey, Virendra Kumar, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Anant Kumar Hegde, Satyapal Singh, Shiv Pratap Shukla, Alphons Kannanthanam, Raj Kumar Singh and Hardeep Singh Puri. Four junior ministers, Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal, Nirmala Sitharaman and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, were promoted to the Union Cabinet.