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resident Droupadi Murmu accepted Pradhan's resignation on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's advice, a Rashtrapati Bhavan communique said. The same communique told Joshi currently in charge of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, plus New and Renewable Energy to take education "in addition to his own duties." No junior minister named alongside him. No word on whether this is permanent, or just what the government could pull together on a Saturday.
That's the tell here, honestly. Nobody planned this reshuffle. It got forced on them.
Pradhan didn't go quietly, even if he went fast. For about ten days, a group calling itself the Cockroach Janata Party had been camped at Delhi's Jantar Mantar Bollywood faces showing up at points, opposition leaders too chanting one thing over and over: Pradhan must resign. The spark was NEET-UG. The National Testing Agency had cancelled exams held on May 3 and May 7 this year after irregularities turned up, forced a redo on June 21, and shipped the whole mess to the CBI. Two cancellations in two years. For students who've sunk years into one entrance exam, that stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a pattern nobody's fixing.
Pradhan's own exit line was almost apologetic. Not about "individual prestige," he said he was disturbed by how the last ten days had gone. Which is a different tune from 2024, when he stood up in Parliament and insisted there was no evidence of a paper leak "in the last seven years." That claim aged badly once Patna-centre irregularities got confirmed a few weeks later. This time, no pushback, no counter-narrative. He just left.
Pralhad Venkatesh Joshi, 63, five-term Lok Sabha MP from Dharwad, ex-BJP state president in Karnataka. He's cycled through Coal, Mines, Parliamentary Affairs since 2019, then Consumer Affairs and Renewable Energy from 2024. Reliable. Not flashy. The kind of minister you hand a ministry when you need it to not fall apart, not when you need it to shine.
Education right now needs both, and Joshi's inheriting it mid-crisis an entrance exam under CBI investigation, a protest movement that just proved it can topple a Cabinet minister, and a policy the NEP 2020 he's now expected to keep selling in public while its own implementing agency gets picked apart in court and on the street.
He's already been out there talking up NEP 2020 in fairly grand terms. Told a Dharwad audience last year it would help "turn India into a global knowledge superpower", around the same time he announced an extra ₹2,000 crore in central funding for IIT Dharwad which happens to sit in his own constituency. Whether that same confidence survives an actual encounter with angry, exam-fatigued students is genuinely unclear.
Here's the part that doesn't go away with a reshuffle: plenty of the Jantar Mantar crowd weren't just asking for Pradhan's head. Many wanted the NTA itself scrapped, or at least rebuilt from scratch, arguing that jamming every big entrance exam through one agency turns a single glitch into a national crisis. That demand is still sitting there. Joshi inherits it in week one, whether he wants it or not.
And there's the plain math of bandwidth. Running Consumer Affairs alone ration systems, price monitoring, the stuff that touches hundreds of millions of people daily is already a full plate. Stack Renewable Energy on top. Now stack a ministry under CBI scrutiny, opposition fire, and a protest movement that knows how to work a news cycle. "Additional charge" can mean the government trusts this guy. It can also just mean nobody else was free on a Saturday.
Either way, the clock's already running on him. Delhi will be watching to see if Joshi becomes the fix or just the next name on the placards.
