Parameswaran Iyer, NITI Aayog chief executive officer, is now ready to leave his post, as he was appointed Executive Director of the World Bank for two years. The place of CEO is now being taken by the former commerce secretary BVR Subrahmanyam, appointed by the ACC (Appointments Committee of Cabinet) as the new CEO.

Parameswaran Iyer has spent less than eight months as CEO at NITI Aayog. He is a civil servant and led the government’s ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ in 2014, and has taken voluntary retirement in 2009 and joined the World Bank in its water and sanitation initiatives.

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, said a government official.

Several government officials have said that this is the second time that Iyer has been handpicked by the Prime Minister itself for an important assignment. In, February 2016, Iyer was brought back to India to head Swachh Bharat Mission, a government program to make rural India open-defecation free.

He has further led the water and sanitation specialist in the Hanoi office of the World Bank and also became the first specialist to be hired by the government. India achieved ODF status last year under his guidance. He resigned from his post in July 2020, ahead of his term getting over, and took over as the program manager of 2030 Water Resources Group, a World Bank wing working in the field of water conservation.

Subrahmanyam has also served under former PM Manmohan Singh between 2004 to 2008 and under Modi from 2012 to 2015. He is a 1988 batch IAS officer, who retires as the Commerce Secretary on September 30, 2022. He has also been specially picked up the PMO and sent to Jammu and Kashmir as the erstwhile state’s chief secretary in June 2018 before the alliance government of the People’s Democratic Party and Bhartiya Janta Party collapsed and governor’s rule was imposed. He served as chief secretary for three years before moving to the central government as the commerce secretary.

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