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NEW DELHI: A year and a half after retiring as a Government of India secretary, Om Prakash Rawat in August 2015 planned a leisure trip to Europe with his family. After the travel dates were confirmed and tickets booked, he and his wife reached Delhi to get their visa. Rawat had already settled down in Bhopal, spending time in social work and academic lectures in colleges across MP, a state where he had a long administrative career as an IAS officer.Rawat, quite unexpectedly, received a phone call from the PMO when the caller sought to know whether he would like to join as an election commissioner. He assented and assumed office the very next day. His unexpected entry into Nirvachan Sadan, however, meant he had missed his European sojourn, leaving his wife to travel alone.On Sunday, Rawat was appointed as the 22nd Chief Election Commissioner of India, replacing AK Joti who is retiring on Monday. As CEC Rawat will have a tenure till December 2 — when he turns 65 — giving him a mandate to handle elections in eight states beginning Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya next month; Karnataka in April-May; and then MP, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Mizoram later this year. “As CEC, my priority will be to have a continuity of delivering free, fair and credible elections through the engagement of all stakeholders and to build consensus on poll reforms,” Rawat told ET soon after the announcement.On new reforms being initiated by the poll body, Rawat said: “We have been considering whether the migrants from one state to another can vote like the voters of the armed forces. Also, I support linking Aadhaar to the voters’ identity. Biometrics should establish the identity before a voter enters into a polling booth and gets access to an EVM. The identification will then be foolproof.”“I, however, don’t want any change in EVMs to integrate this feature. The EVM must remain a standalone machine with no connection to any other device or to the Internet,” he added.Son of a primary school teacher, Ram Swarup Rawat, and homemaker, Kamla Devi, Rawat grew up in a small UP town, Jhansi, and got his early education in Hindi-medium government schools. Later, he went to BHU to pursue masters in physics. He was interested in academics, but not getting selected as a college lecturer in two successive interviews — he was a topper in BHU — made him suspect the selection process itself. He then sat for the Indian Forest Service examination and got through in 1975.While undergoing his probation in IFS Academy in Dehradun, he cracked the IAS examination.“One of the most satisfying periods of my administrative career was when I visited one tribal village after another in MP (2007 and 2009) to enforce the Forest Rights Act, 2006.” No wonder, Rawat and his team received the PM’s award for excellence in public administration in 2010 for enforcing the rights of the tribal dwellers. Rawat’s elevation as CEC comes at a time when EC ’s decision to suspend 20 AAP MLAs is being questioned in some quarters.Rawat had initially recused himself in the case after Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal had questioned his impartiality, but was later persuaded to come on board. EC had also faced the heat during the just-concluded Gujarat elections over the “enforcement or non-enforcement” of the model code of conduct.For his friends and family though, Rawat’s elevation is only logical. Dr Chandra Prakash Gupta, a Gwalior-based paediatric and Rawat’s classmate in school, said: “Ask anyone in MP, everyone who knows my friend will echo the same: he is intelligent, hard-working, down-to-earth and honest. For me though he has remained the same school boy I met many many years ago.”