NEW DELHI: With Prime Minister Narendra Modi firming up the top-level appointments of Nripendra Misra as principal secretary and Ajit Doval as national security advisor (NSA) in his first week, the foundation has been laid for a new-look, all-important, powerwielding Prime Minister’s Office that won’t brook individual ministers undermining the government, something that afflicted the UPA regime. A few more key officials are to be brought in to make the PMO the effective seat of governance under Modi.One of them is likely to be Andhra Pradesh cadre officer Satish Chandra, who looks set to get the important job of private secretary to the PM. Chandra’s appointment, if ratified, would be significant as he has earlier served as special secretary to N Chandrababu Naidu during his last 25 months as CM of Andhra (2002-04). The 1986 batch officer is now resident commissioner of AP in the Capital after a long stint in the fertiliser ministry.S Jaishankar, India’s ambassador to the US and a well-regarded Indian Foreign Service officer, is being considered for the role of foreign policy advisor to the PM. With Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth retiring on June 13, the government will have to decide soon on his successor as well.Sutanu Behuria, a 1976 batch Himachal Pradesh officer who is currently the secretary in charge of heavy industries, is the senior-most candidate for the job, but others such as Petroleum Secretary Saurabh Chandra and Jawed Usmani are also in the fray. Usmani has just been shunted out by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav as the state chief secretary.With the PM sending out a clear message in the first week that bureaucrats must be free to do their jobs without fear of prosecution, officials are keenly watching to see if the Modi administration goes by seniority while appointing the cabinet secretary — a practice that was abandoned by UPA. The PMO and Cabinet secretariat will need to work in close tandem to deliver the effective governance Modi has pledged.Officials said one of the biggest problems with UPA-2 was that the Cabinet secretary and the principal secretary to the PM were both from the same batch and cadre (Uttar Pradesh, 1974), with the latter, Pulok Chatterji, having little experience of policy-making in a ministry.This won’t be the case anymore with Misra replacing Chatterji in PMO. Doval succeeds Shiv Shankar Menon as NSA.Modi has already roped in two officers from the Gujarat administration in the new PMO as joint secretaries — IAS officer AK Sharma and Indian Forest Service officer Bharat Lal — both from the 1988 batch. Sharma was secretary to Modi in Gandhinagar while Lal was the resident commissioner of Gujarat in the Capital.The current secretary to the prime minister, R Ramanujam, retires next month, creating another high-level vacancy in the PMO. The tenure of central deputation of some other senior officials from Manmohan Singh’s days in PMO, such as additional secretary to the PM Shatrughna Singh and joint secretary BVR Subrahmanyam, one of the first appointees in the UPA PMO, are scheduled to end in March 2015.The position of advisor to the PM, created for TKA Nair in the Singh PMO after Chatterji replaced him as the principal secretary, may not be continued in its present form.Chandra is likely to replace Indian Foreign Service officer Vikram Misri, the current private secretary to the PM, who is expected to move to a senior diplomatic role outside the PMO soon. Another private secretary to Manmohan Singh, Indu Shekhar Chaturvedi, moved to the International Monetary Fund in Washington in April 2014.On May 29, when Modi took an unprecedented tour of all the offices in PMO, right down to those in which section officers operate, Misri appears to be the one showing him around in the official photograph of the tour.The same picture clearly shows Modi flanked by the three new officers who arrived at the PMO an hour before he officially joined work last Tuesday — Misra, whose appointment as principal secretary was confirmed after an ordinance was ratified by President Pranab Mukherjee on May 28, Sharma and Lal.IFS officer Jawed Ashraf and IAS officer Anu Garg are also joint secretaries to the PM. Both were appointed to the PMO jobs in 2012. Ashraf handled external affairs, defence, and the departments of space, atomic energy and overseas Indian affairs in the Singh PMO while Garg was entrusted with human resource development, agriculture, health and family welfare and the PM’s National Council on Nutrition.The allocation of work in the new PMO is yet to be formalised. The appointment of a communications advisor to the PM, a post that was held by Sanjaya Baru in UPA-1 and Harish Khare and Pankaj Pachauri through UPA’s second innings, is also awaited.