TV Somanathan is appointed Cabinet secretary

The cabinet appointments committee chose TV Somanathan as India's new cabinet secretary. A 1987 batch Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer and current finance secretary, Somanathan will serve a two-year term, initially assuming the role of officer on special duty. He will take over India's top bureaucratic post on August 30, according to a statement from the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT).

With a distinguished career spanning over three decades, he has held various key positions, including joint secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and joint secretary and additional secretary at the Prime Minister's Office.

Bold Policy Reforms

Somanathan has also served as secretary to the Tamil Nadu chief minister and founder managing director of the Chennai Metro Rail Project. He also worked at the World Bank, with his first stint in 1996 as financial economist, East Asia, when he became the youngest sector manager of the budget policy group. He was also as a World Bank director from 2011 to 2015.

A PhD in economics, Somanathan's tenure at the finance ministry has been marked by bold policy reforms. He joined the ministry as expenditure secretary in December 2019, months before the pandemic struck India. He was a key architect of the government's capex-led growth push to support the economy as it emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

He is also credited with policies such as the Aatmanirbhar Bharat stimulus packages, the design of the production-linked initiative (PLI) scheme, the one-nation one-ration card scheme and the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP), which seeks to leverage assets worth Rs 6 lakh crore over a five-year period (FY21-26) to create additional financing revenue to fund infrastructure development.

Another key initiative was the bad bank set up to ensure better management of non-performing assets as embattled state-run banks were nursed to health. In public finance, the launch of the single nodal agency (SNA) dashboard was critical to ensure timely and efficient use of funds for centrally sponsored schemes, using technology to monitor usage, track all transactions, plug slippages and loopholes and save on interest on unutilised funds.

Reforms in public procurement were also initiated by Somanathan, scrapping archaic rules and making it mandatory for departments to clear 75% of running bills within 10 working days.