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Former Gujarat additional chief secretary (home) S K Nanda passed away in the United States on Saturday. He was 68. A 1978-batch bureaucrat from the Gujarat cadre, Nanda had gone to the US to visit his children with his wife Sanjukta on July 22 and is said to have suffered a cardiac arrest early Saturday. Sources said, he was in hospital under treatment for pneumonia. Nanda, who was the collector of Dang, Vadodara, Panchmahal, Banaskantha and Junagadh districts, last held the post of chairman and managing director of Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals Ltd (GSFC) from where he retired in 2016. He served as additional chief secretary (home) when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Gujarat chief minister from 2012-2014. However, when Anandiben Patel took over as chief minister, Nanda, who was the senior most bureaucrat in the state, was superseded and a 1981 batch IAS officer D J Pandian was appointed chief secretary, a rarity in Gujarat. Nanda, who specialised in ham radio operations , had first used amateur radio operators as relief commissioner of Gujarat to establish contact with Amreli district when it was completely cut off after a cyclone in 1997. In 2001, after the Kutch earthquake of January 26, the Gujarat Institute of Amateur Radio (GIAR) was chaired by Nanda. Recently, when Cyclone Biparjoy hit Gujarat, at least 38 ham radio operators from GIAR were deployed at the State Emergency Operation Centre (SEOC), a control room for disasters. As per his LinkedIn profile, Nanda handled the water scarcity that hit the state in 1984 and the drought situation in 1985-87. He remained the ‘guardian secretary’ of Dang district for a long time and in 2014, he released a book Dangs-The Little Known Paradise of India. Nanda, who belongs to Odisha ’s Puri district, was the chairperson of the Jagannath Cultural Academy and Research Centre (JCARC) and the Odisha Socio-Cultural Association (OSCA) which set up an Odisha-styled Jagannath temple in Adalaj, Gandhinagar in 2014. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel was the chief guest at the rath yatra held at this temple on July 7. None
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