Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Thursday made several key appointments related to Parliamentary Standing Committees for a yearlong tenure beginning May 1. The appointments were made to committees on Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; Public Undertakings; Estimates; and Public Accounts. Congress general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal has been named Chairperson of the Committee on Public Accounts. Incidentally, Venugopal is being seen as a probable candidate for the chief minister’s post in Kerala where exit polls predict a Congress-led UDF government.

Batch of Honour

As many as 17 secretaries, all of them from the 1992 batch, posted in New Delhi assembled for a farewell to outgoing MSME Secretary S C L Das on Thursday.…