TV Somanathan, currently serving in the Ministry of Finance, was appointed as the new Cabinet Secretary by the government on Saturday for a two-year term. He succeeds incumbent Rajiv Gauba, whose unprecedented five-year tenure at the top bureaucratic post ends later this month.
The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved Mr Somanathan’s appointment as Cabinet Secretary with a two-year tenure from August 30, an order issued by the Personnel Ministry said. The ACC, headed 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 duty until he assumes charge of the Cabinet Secretary,” the order said.
Meanwhile, the government is also likely to appoint a new Home Secretary soon as the incumbent Ajay Kumar Bhalla (a 1984-batch IAS officer) completes his five-year term on August 22.
TV Somanathan, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from Tamil Nadu (1987 batch), served as joint secretary and additional secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office under PM Modi for a little over two years between 2015 and 2017. He later served in his state cadre before being appointed expenditure secretary in December 2019.
Somanathan (now 59 years old) was appointed Finance Secretary in April 2021. He is a qualified chartered accountant (CA) and company secretary (CS) and is fluent in five languages – English, French, Hausa (spoken in certain parts of Africa), Hindi and Tamil, official records show.
The veteran bureaucrat also holds a PhD in economics from Calcutta University. Somanathan is also the chairman of a committee set up in April last year to review the pension scheme for government employees. He has served in various positions in his state, at the Centre and abroad. Mr Somanathan’s roles have included working at the World Bank (US), as Secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and as Managing Director of Chennai Metro Corporation.
Mr Gauba will have the honour of being the longest-serving Cabinet Secretary in the country.
So far, the longest-serving Cabinet Secretary was BD Pande from November 2, 1972, to March 31, 1977. Gauba was appointed to the country’s top bureaucratic post for two years in 2019. It has been extended three times for one year – in 2021, 2022 and most recently in August last year.
The IAS officer from Jharkhand, born in 1982, is considered to be the main man behind the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, which divided the former state into the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh after abrogating its special status under Article 370 of the Constitution.
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