IANS/Lucknow

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav yesterday sacked eight cabinet ministers and withdrew the portfolios of nine ministers in a major shake-up.
The move is being seen as a precursor to a cabinet reshuffle tomorrow when some new faces are likely to be included in the 43-month-old Samajwadi Party government.
The ministers who have been removed are Shiv Kumar Beria, Bhagwat Sharan Gangwar, Ambika Chowdhary, Aridaman Singh, Alok Kumar Shakya, Yogesh Pratap Singh, Shivakant Ojha and Narad Rai.
Sources say the ministers have been removed following recommendation by the SP high command for their non-performance and, in some cases, on specific complaints. The nine ministers who have been stripped of their portfolios include Raguhraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya, Avdhesh Prasad, and Ahmad Hasan, who held the health and family welfare portfolio.
Other ministers to be divested of their ministries are Paras Nath Yadav, Ram Govind Chowdhary, Durga Prasad Yadav, Brahma Shankar Tripathi, Iqbal Masood and Mehboob Ali. Their departments, for now, will be with the chief minister.
Close aides of the chief minister said the cabinet expansion scheduled tomorrow will see a “stamp of Akhilesh Yadav and will be a mix of young energy and experience”.
Earlier, Yadav called on Governor Ram Naik to discuss expansion of his cabinet and to take Naik’s consent.  The oath-taking ceremony of the new ministers will be held tomorrow 31 at 10.30am at Raj Bhawan in Lucknow.
The Congress meanwhile said the move was “too little, too late”.
Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee president Nirmal Khatri said the alleged ‘clean-up act’ of Yadav was not going to make much of a difference in governance as the corrupt were still very much within the government.
“Whatever tricks this discredited government may try the reality is that the people will boot them out in the 2017 state assembly elections for their misgovernance, poor law and order and failure to maintain communal harmony in Uttar Pradesh,” the Congress leader said.
“The Samajwadi Party government may try to show that they are trying to set their house in order but the people of the state are not going to be fooled by such superficial actions,” Khatri said in a statement.