Gopal Baglay will succeed Vikas Swarup as the Spokesperson of Ministry of External Affairs.
Baglay is from the 1992 batch of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and has handled the role of a press counsellor at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu from 2008 to 2010. He has also served as a director in the MEA's external publicity division from 2010 to 2011.
Baglay served as deputy High Commissioner in High Commission of India, Islamabad from October 2014 to December 2015. While he was the Joint Secretary (States), Baglay was tasked with the responsibility to set up a separate department in the Ministry of External Affairs to facilitate the international outreach of India's states.
Baglay was also the deputy high commissioner to Pakistan and headed the territorial division of PAI (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran) from 2015 to 2017.
Baglay holds a Masters degree in Chemistry from Lucknow University. He knows Ukrainian and can speak Russian, apart from Hindi, Urdu, English and Nepali.
The MEA will undergo a major rejig with several officials set to retire early next year, and a few on the verge of completing their tenures.
Vishnu Prakash, a former MEA spokesperson, will step down as the country's ambassador to Canada to make way for Vikas Swarup.
