Senior IAS officer T V Somanathan appointed Cabinet Secretary for two years

Dipam secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey could be the next Finance Secretary

The Appointments Committee of the Union Cabinet on Saturday appointed senior bureaucrat T V Somanathan as the cabinet secretary of India.

He will remain in office for a tenure of two years, starting August 30. Somanathan, a 1987-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, is currently serving as finance secretary of India.

He will discharge the duty of officer on special duty in the cabinet secretariat from the date he joins the assignment till he takes over as the cabinet secretary, the appointments committee said in the notification.

Somanathan became the expenditure secretary in the finance ministry in 2019 and was designated the finance secretary in 2021. A veteran in the budget-making exercise, Somanathan has tried balancing the demands of coalition partners without compromising on fiscal rectitude in the July budget.

 

A 1987-batch IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, Somanathan worked in the prime minister’s office from April 2015 to August 2017. 

The bureaucrat played a major role in the FY22 budget, which ended the practice of borrowing money outside the budget. This was an effort to make the balance sheets of the central government more transparent.

A PhD in economics, the finance secretary has published more than 80 papers and articles on economics. He has also authored two books.

Somanathan has also served as joint secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and worked as director at the World Bank, Washington, D.C., on deputation.

With this development, senior IAS officer Tuhin Kanta Pandey could be the next finance secretary. Typically, the senior-most bureaucrat in the finance ministry becomes the finance secretary.

As the secretary of the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (Dipam), Pandey is responsible for finalising the targets for disinvestment and resource mobilisation through dividends of public sector enterprises.

A 1987-batch civil servant from the Odisha cadre, Pandey is credited with concluding the long-pending sale of the national carrier Air India and was also instrumental in the public debut of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC).