Rajiv becomes Finance secretary , Arvind is the chief economic advisor
Finance ministry is seeing a complete bureaucratic revamp at the senior level
By : pawan bali
Update: 2014-10-17 02:24 GMT
New Delhi: The finance ministry is seeing a complete bureaucratic revamp at the senior level by the new Modi government which came into power nearly five months back. Finance secretary and economic affairs secretary Arvind Mayaram was shunted out on Thur-sday and was replaced by Rajasthan’s chief secretary Rajiv Mehrishi. Dr Mayaram has been appointed as the tourism secretary.
The Centre appointed US based economist Arvi-nd Subramanian as the chief economic advisor. Dr Subramanian who has been appointed as the new chief economic advisor is the senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington and as been described in some quarters as the closest adviser to the RBI governor Raghuram Rajan. Incidentally, chief economic advisor post fell vacant after Mr Rajan moved to the RBI governor post.
Out of five departments in the finance ministry, now three secretaries have been appointed by the new BJP government. These include Mr Mehri-shi the new economic affairs secretary, Aradh-ana Johri secretary depa-rtment of disinvestment and Shaktikanta Das who is revenue secretary.Mr Ratan P Watal, expenditure secretary and Gurdial Singh Sandhu financial services secretary were appointed by the previous Congress led UPA regime.
Mr Das was appointed as the revenue secretary after the transfer of Rajiv Takru to department of north eastern region in June just before NDA’s first budget. Ms Johri, an IAS officer of the 1980 batch was appointed secretary, department of disinvestment from October 1 after the retirement of incumbent Ravi Mathur. Out of the five secretaries the senior most also gets the designation of the finance secretary.