New Delhi: A little over seven months after he was appointed the Niti Aayog’s chief executive officer (CEO) for a period of two years, Parameswaran Iyer was on Monday moved out of the role, with the government appointing BVR Subrahmanyam as the next CEO of the federal think tank.
A 1987-batch Chhattisgarh cadre IAS officer who retired as the commerce secretary, Subrahmanyam has also served in the Prime Minister’s Office in the past.
Iyer, a retired 1981-batch IAS officer, was appointed as the executive director, World Bank, and will be posted at the multilateral agency’s headquarters at Washington DC for a fixed period of three years in place of 1988 Haryana cadre IAS officer Rajesh Khullar, according to an official order.
Khullar is being repatriated to his parent cadre on the request of the Haryana government, according to the order issued by the Appointments Committee of Cabinet on Monday evening.
The order to cut short Iyer’s term as the Niti Aayog CEO and send him to the World Bank as executive director has surprised many in bureaucratic circles, as has the appointment of his successor Subrahmanyam. Just before his retirement last September, Subrahmanyam was given additional charge of chairman and managing director of the India Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO) after the tenure of incumbent CMD LC Goyal ended. Subrahmanyam never took the ITPO charge after his retirement, a government official told ThePrint, asking not to be named.
Considered to be among Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s preferred civil servants, Iyer had replaced Amitabh Kant after the latter’s term got over in June 2022.
Another government official said that this was the second time that Iyer was handpicked by the PM for an important assignment. Earlier, in February 2016, Iyer was brought back from the World Bank to head the Swachh Bharat Mission, a programme among the government’s ambitious missions that aims to make rural India open-defecation-free.
Back then, he was working as the lead water and sanitation specialist in the Hanoi office of the World Bank when the Prime Minister’s Office brought him back as the drinking water and sanitation secretary. He was among the first specialists to be hired by the Modi government.
Known to lead by example, the picture of Iyer getting inside a twin toilet pit and emptying it with his hand in a Telangana village in February 2017 best defined his approach to his job. The act won accolades from Modi, who, in his monthly radio programme ‘Mann ki Baat’, called it “remarkable”.
It was under Iyer that rural India achieved the ODF status last year. However, Iyer resigned from his post in July 2020, ahead of his term getting over and took over as the programme manager of 2030 Water Resources Group, a World Bank wing working in the field of water conservation.
Subrahmanyam, on the other hand, was specially picked by the PMO and sent to Jammu and Kashmir as the erstwhile state’s chief secretary in June 2018, a little before the alliance government of the Peoples Democratic Party and Bharatiya Janata Party collapsed and Governor’s Rule was imposed.
He oversaw a tumultuous phase, with Article 370 getting nullified and the state getting bifurcated into two Union Territories. He served as the chief secretary for three years before moving to the central government as the commerce secretary.
Subrahmanyam has served in PMO under former PM Manmohan Singh between 2004 to 2008 and under Modi between 2012 and 2015.
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