Senior IAS TV Somanathan
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: Finance Secretary T V Somanathan will be the next Cabinet Secretary, succeeding incumbent Rajiv Gauba who will be completing five years in office.
Prior to taking over as Cabinet Secretary on August 30, Somanathan has been appointed as Officer on Special Duty in the Cabinet Secretariat. Gauba, the longest serving Cabinet Secretary, will retire this month-end.
Cabinet Secretary is the topmost bureaucrat in the Union government.
Somanathan, a 1987-batch IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, has earlier worked in Tamil Nadu government and in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, besides being Joint Secretary and Additional Secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi before being appointed as Finance Secretary.
A Ph.D in Economics from Calcutta University, he completed the Executive Development Programme of Harvard Business School, and is a fully qualified chartered/cost accountant and company secretary.
In 1996, he joined the World Bank in Washington through the Young Professionals Programme as Financial Economist in the East Asia and Pacific Regional Vice Presidency and four years later, he became one of the Bank’s youngest Sector Managers when he was appointed Manager of the Budget Policy Group. In 2011, his services were sought by the World Bank and he served as Director till 2015.
Besides Tamil, English and Hindi, Somanathan also speaks French and Hausa, a Chadic language that is spoken by the Hausa people in parts of African countries.