Finance Secretary T V Somanathan named new Cabinet Secretary

New Delhi: The Centre on Saturday named Finance Secretary T V Somanathan as the new cabinet secretary for a tenure of two years.

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

The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved Somanathan’s appointment as the cabinet secretary with a tenure of two years from August 30, 2024, 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.

Somanathan, a 1987 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, served as the joint secretary and additional secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) 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. Somanathan (now 59 years) was designated as the finance secretary in April 2021.

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 the Calcutta University.

Somanathan is also the chairman of a committee, set-up in April last year, to review the pension system for the government employees. He has served in different positions in his cadre state, Centre and abroad.

Somanathan worked in the World Bank (USA), joint secretary in the Corporate Affairs Ministry and as managing director of the Chennai Metro Corporation among others.

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

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 extension 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.