A panel headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to appoint Gyanesh Kumar as the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and Vivek Joshi as the Election Commissioner. Earlier, Kumar worked as the Election Commissioner for a year. While Joshi was Haryana’s chief secretary. Both Kumar and Joshi have commendable educational qualifications with the best institutes in the country and abroad.

CEC Gyanesh Kumar was born in Agra, Uttar Pradesh and after completing his schooling in the city, he cracked JEE Main and Advanced. He went on to pursue a BTech degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Kanpur.  After graduation, he studied Business Finance at ICFAI and Environmental Economics at Harvard University in the US. A 1988-batch officer of the Kerala cadre, Kumar served as the Secretary of the Cooperation Ministry at the time of his retirement in January 2024.

The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is one of the Institutes of National Importance awarded by the Government of India. The Institute ranked four under the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2024 in the engineering category. Moreover, in the overall category of the ranking, it ranked 5, 7 in the research category, and 30th in the management category.

Not only national recognition, the QS World University Ranking 2024 has also placed the institute at 263rd position among the top colleges in the world. RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra has also graduated from IIT Kanpur in computer science. 

In the QS World University Rankings 2025, the University has ranked 4 while on another ranking Times Higher Education Rankings, Harvard ranked third spot. Harvard University is the oldest university in the USA.

Vivek Joshi holds a degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Roorkee and completed his PhD in International Economics from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. After cracking UPSC CSE, as an IAS officer, Joshi began his bureaucratic career in 1991 as a sub-district officer (civil) in Haryana’s Gohana town.

In the year 2024, under the NIRF category, IIT Roorkee ranked 6 with a score of 76, a decline of one rank as compared to 2023. Last year the Institute ranked 5 and that too with a score of 75.64. The only way to get admission to the IIT Roorkee is through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE Main) and JEE Advanced.

Compared to the engineering category, IIT Roorkee is performing great in architecture and planning. Over the last four years, it has maintained a steady rank. It was just in 2020, when the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur secured the first spot.