Subrahmanyam, ex-comm secy, to head Niti Aayog

NEW DELHI: The government on Monday appointed former commerce secretary B V R Subrahmanyam as the new chief executive of Niti Aayog, replacing Parameswaran Iyer who will move to Washington as India's executive director to the World Bank, after just seven months in the think tank.

The move also means that Rajesh Khullar, a 1988 batch IAS officer from Haryana, will return to his state cadre before the end of his term at the World Bank. For Iyer, the job at the World Bank marks a return to Washington as he had resigned from the IAS to take up an assignment at the multilateral agency only to return to India to drive the Swachh Bharat programme, before heading back to the US.

Subrahmanyam, who will be the fourth CEO of Niti Aayog, has been instrumental in driving the negotiation of free trade agreements (FTAs) in his role as commerce secretary. The former IAS officer from the Chhattisgarh cadre played a key role in the revamp of the Capital's Pragati Maidan, the venue for the G20 leaders' summit scheduled for later this year.

With long years in the PMO, working initially with Manmohan Singh and subsequently with Narendra Modi, he was handpicked to serve as the chief secretary of Jammu & Kashmir after the special status granted to it was revoked. Subrahmanyam is seen as an officer who can drive the government's initiatives on the economy while keeping the social and political aspects in mind.


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