Mumbai: Ten days after Devendra Fadnavis took oath as the chief minister for the third time, the much-awaited Maharashtra cabinet expansion took place on Sunday at Raj Bhavan in Nagpur with the swearing in of 39 MLAs.
Governor CP Radhakrishnan administered oath to the ministers in the presence of chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and his deputies Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar. This comes a day before the commencement of the week-long Winter Session of the state legislature on December 16.
While 33 – 16 are from BJP, 9 from Shiv Sena and 8 from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)- were inducted as Cabinet ministers, six were sworn in as ministers of state.
Chandrashekhar Bawankule, BJP’s state president, was the first to be sworn in as cabinet minister. Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, Ashish Shelar, Chandrakant Patil, Girish Mahajan, Ganesh Naik, Mangal Pratap Lodha, Jaykumar Rawal, Pankaja Munde and Atul Sawe of the saffron party were also among those who took an oath.
Patil, who was earlier with the Congress, Shiv Sena and now BJP, was the revenue minister and Sawe the housing minister in the previous Shinde government. Naik is also a turncoat having switched sides to Shiv Sena and NCP before joining the BJP in 2019. Mahajan, on the other hand, is known to be a close confidant of Fadnavis.
Dada Bhuse, Shambhuraj Desai, Sanjay Rathod, Gulabrao Patil and Uday Samant were among those sworn in from Shiv Sena. Similarly, NCP leaders Manikrao Kokate, Dattatray Vithoba Bharne, Hasan Mushrif, Aditi Sunil Tatkare and Dhananjay Munde took oath at the ceremony
