Facebook appoints former IAS officer as head of public policy, a year after Ankhi Das quit

• The development comes a year after Ankhi Das quit the position amidst allegations of favouring the ruling BJP.
• Aggarwal has three decades of experience as an IAS officer and a public policy expert.
• He had also worked with Uber as the head of public policy for India and South Asia.

US-based social networking giant Facebook has appointed former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Rajiv Aggarwal as the head of Public Policy, almost a year after Ankhi Das quit the position amidst allegations of favouring the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Aggarwal has three decades of experience as an IAS officer and a public policy expert.

He started off his career as an assistant mechanical engineer at Indian railways in 1991 and has spent 26 years working in the IAS. He has been a District Magistrate in nine districts across the state of Uttar Pradesh.

During his tenure as an administrative officer, Aggarwal steered India's first ever national policy on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) as Joint Secretary in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, which comes under the ministry of commerce.

He later joined Uber in 2019 as the head of public policy for India as well as South Asia.

The appointment of Aggarwal as the head of public policy is an important one, especially after the allegations that were raised against former public policy chief Ankhi Das last year.

According to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report published in August 2020, Das was accused of not applying the company's hate speech policy to BJP politicians to seek favours from the Indian government. Das had reportedly told staff members at Facebook that punishing the violations by leaders from BJP would damage the company’s business prospects in the country.

Even the parliamentary standing committee on information technology, led by member of parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor, decided to look into these allegations last year. Facebook India head Ajit Mohan and Das were asked to appear before the committee.

The social media platform has also been part of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytics allegedly harvested data of 87 million of Facebook users for political advertisements. The data was taken without people’s consent.

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