Senior IAS Officer T V Somanathan Appointed Cabinet Secretary

Finance Secretary T V Somanathan was on Saturday named as the new Cabinet Secretary by the government for a tenure of two years.

He will succeed incumbent Rajiv Gauba, who completes his unprecedented five-year term in the top bureaucratic post this month-end.

The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved Mr Somanathan's appointment as the Cabinet Secretary with a tenure of two years from August 30, an order issued by the Personnel Ministry said.

The ACC-led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also approved his appointment as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the Cabinet Secretariat "from the date he joins the assignment till he takes over as Cabinet Secretary", it said.

Meanwhile, a new Union Home Secretary is also likely to be appointed by the government soon, as incumbent Ajay Kumar Bhalla (a 1984 batch IAS officer) completes his five-year tenure on August 22.

Mr Somanathan, a 1987 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, served as Joint Secretary and Additional Secretary in the Prime Minister's Office under Modi for a little over two years between 2015 and 2017.

Later, he served in his cadre state before being appointed as the Expenditure Secretary in December 2019.

Mr Somanathan (now 59 years) was designated as the Finance Secretary in April 2021.

He is a qualified Chartered Accountant (CA) and Company Secretary (CS), he knows five languages -- English, French, Hausa (spoken in select parts of Africa), Hindi and Tamil, according to official records.

The veteran bureaucrat also has a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in economics from Calcutta University.

Mr Somanathan is also the chairman of a committee, set-up in April last year, to review the pension system for government employees.

He has served in different positions in his cadre state, Centre and abroad. Mr Somanathan worked in the World Bank (USA), Joint Secretary in the Corporate Affairs Ministry and as Managing Director of Chennai Metro Corporation among others.

Mr Gauba will have a distinction of being the longest serving Cabinet Secretary of the country.

Till now, B D Pande has the longest tenure on the top post from November 2, 1972, to March 31, 1977. Gauba, a former Union Home Secretary, was in 2019 appointed to the country's top bureaucratic post for two years.

He was given one-year extensions thrice-- in 2021, 2022 and the latest in August last year.

A 1982-batch IAS officer of Jharkhand cadre, he is said to be the key architect of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, under which the erstwhile state was bifurcated into Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh following the abrogation of the special status given to it under Article 370 of the Constitution.

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