UP Government Shifts 15 IPS Officers, Mutha Ashok Jain Named DGP Fire Services
Uttar Pradesh government transfers 15 IPS officers, with Mutha Ashok Jain posted as DGP Fire and Emergency Services and Tarun Gaba named Police Commissioner, Lucknow.
The Uttar Pradesh government transferred 15 IPS officers on Tuesday, with Mutha Ashok Jain posted as Director General of Police, Fire and Emergency Services, at the state police headquarters in Lucknow.
The reshuffle covers the state's police headquarters, zonal, and district-level command structure, a system Uttar Pradesh administers across the country's most populous state with more than 200 million residents. Fire and Emergency Services has grown in administrative importance in recent years as the state has pushed disaster-response reforms following a series of high-profile fire incidents in Lucknow and other cities, giving Jain's posting operational significance beyond its administrative rank. The department has also been expanding its equipment modernisation programme, inducting high-rise rescue vehicles and additional fire stations in rapidly urbanising districts where building-code enforcement has struggled to keep pace with construction activity.
Amarendra K Sengar has been posted as DGP Intelligence, with additional charge as Director General of Police, Security — a portfolio covering VIP protection and internal security assessments for the state's political leadership. Ram Kumar takes charge as Additional Director General of Police, Gorakhpur Zone, a politically significant posting given the zone's proximity to the Chief Minister's home constituency. Naveen Arora moves to Additional Director General of Police, Varanasi Zone, while Piyush Mordia has been named Police Commissioner of the Prayagraj Police Commissionerate.
Bhagwan S. Srivastava has been posted as Additional Director General of Police, Technical Services, overseeing forensic and surveillance infrastructure for the force, while Dr Sanjeev Gupta takes charge as Additional Director General of Police at the headquarters, with additional charge of the Logistics wing. Tarun Gaba has been named Police Commissioner of the Lucknow Police Commissionerate, placing him in charge of law and order for the state capital under the commissionerate system UP adopted for its largest cities in 2020.
Further down the reshuffle, Dharmveer becomes Inspector General of Police, PAC Eastern Zone, in Prayagraj, while Mohit Gupta takes over the Anti-Corruption Organisation as Inspector General, and Vinod Kumar Singh moves to Special Investigation as Inspector General. Jogendra Kumar has been posted as Inspector General at the Police Training School, Moradabad, and Anand Sureshrao Kulkarni becomes Secretary, Home, in the state government. Anoop Kumar Singh takes charge as Superintendent of Police, Economic Offences Wing, and Anand Kumar becomes Superintendent of Police, Public Grievances, at the DGP headquarters.
Reshuffles of this scale are typically undertaken to align senior command with shifting law-and-order priorities ahead of major administrative or security calendars, and the mix of headquarters, zonal, and commissionerate postings here suggests the state is recalibrating leadership across all three tiers simultaneously. The commissionerate postings in particular — Lucknow and Prayagraj among them — carry magisterial powers alongside policing duties, a hybrid model Uttar Pradesh adopted for its major cities to speed up decision-making on law-and-order matters that would otherwise require separate district magistrate clearance.
The Gorakhpur and Varanasi zone postings also carry heightened significance given both cities' status as focal points for VVIP movement and large religious congregations, requiring the respective zonal ADGs to coordinate closely with central paramilitary forces during peak pilgrimage and festival seasons. The Anti-Corruption Organisation and Special Investigation postings, meanwhile, sit among the more specialised assignments in this reshuffle, typically drawing officers with prior experience in economic offences and forensic case-building rather than general law-and-order command.
Tuesday's order from the Uttar Pradesh Home Department places all 15 officers in their new roles with immediate effect, with individual charge handovers to follow at each posting location over the coming days.
