New Delhi, March 19 (IANS) Vikram K Doraiswami, presently High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom, has been appointed as the next Ambassador of India to the People’s Republic of China, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) announced on Thursday.

A 1992 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, Doraiswami is expected to take up the assignment shortly.

He was appointed as the High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom in August 2022 after having served as India’s High Commissioner to Bangladesh.

After his in-service training in New Delhi from 1992-1993, Doraiswami was posted to the Commission of India in Hong Kong in May 1994 as Third Secretary. He learnt Chinese, taking an elective diploma in that language at the New Asia Yale-in-Asia language school of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was posted to the Embassy of India in Beijing in September 1996 where he served for nearly four years.

After having served at the Prime Minister’s Office in 2002 and as Private Secretary to the Prime Minister of India, Doraiswami was posted to the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in New York as Political Counsellor in 2006.

In October 2009, Doraiswami was posted as India’s Consul General in Johannesburg, South Africa.

According to the MEA, Doraiswami returned to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi in July 2011, where he was given charge as the Head of the Division for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a post he held till October 2012. During this period, he was also Coordinator for the Fourth Summit meeting of BRICS in New Delhi in March 2012.

A seasoned diplomat, Doraiswami was Joint Secretary of the Americas Division of the MEA from October 2012 to October 2014. He joined the Embassy of India in Tashkent at the end of October 2014 as Ambassador of India to Uzbekistan. He arrived in Seoul in April 2015 to take charge as the Ambassador of India to South Korea.

Currently, Pradeep Kumar Rawat, who joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1990, is India’s Ambassador to China. Ambassador Rawat had also opted to learn Mandarin Chinese as his foreign language and served in Hong Kong and Beijing between 1992 and 1997.

Ambassador Rawat started his second tenure in Beijing in 2003 as Counsellor and ended in 2007 as Deputy Chief of Mission. He was appointed as India’s Ambassador to China in December 2021.

–IANS

/as