T V Somanathan, a veteran bureaucrat, was named India’s cabinet secretary on Saturday by the Union Cabinet’s Appointments Committee.
Beginning on August 30, he will serve a two-year term in office. Currently holding the position of India’s finance secretary is Somanathan, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the 1987 batch.
The appointments committee stated in the announcement that he will carry out the responsibilities of an officer on special duty in the cabinet secretariat from the time he begins the assignment until he assumes the position of cabinet secretary.
In the finance ministry, Somanathan was appointed expenditure secretary in 2019 and finance secretary in 2021. Experienced in creating budgets, Somanathan attempted to strike a balance between coalition partners’ requests and economic integrity in the July budget.
Somanathan, an IAS officer from the Tamil Nadu cadre, was appointed to the prime minister’s office in 1987 and served there from April 2015 to August 2017.
The FY22 budget, which put a halt to the practice of borrowing money outside the budget, was greatly influenced by the bureaucracy. This was an attempt to increase the transparency of the central government’s balance sheets.
The finance secretary holds a PhD in economics and has written more than 80 papers and publications in the field. He is the author of two books as well.
In addition, Somanathan held the position of joint secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and was a delegation director at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
Senior IAS officer Tuhin Kanta Pandey may become the next finance secretary as a result of this event. The finance secretary is usually the most senior bureaucrat in the ministry of finance.
Pandey is in charge of deciding on the goals for disinvestment and resource mobilisation through dividends from public sector companies in her capacity as secretary of the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (Dipam).
Pandey, an Odisha cadre government servant from 1987, is known for having completed the long-awaited sale of Air India, the country’s national carrier, and for having played a key role in the launch of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC).