Within hours of getting his transfer order to the Power Ministry from Finance, Subhash Chandra Garg applied for voluntary retirement. He was due to retire on October 31, 2020.

“(I) handed over charge of Economic Affairs today. Learnt so much in the Finance Ministry and Economic Affairs Dept. (I) will take charge in Power Ministry tomorrow. (I) have also applied for Voluntary Retirement from the IAS with effect from 31st October,” Garg said in its tweet confirming the move.

If accepted, it will be second instance of a Finance Secretary leaving service before his retirement age. Way back in 2000, the then Finance Secretary EAS Sarma, who was also holding charge of Economic Affairs, quit the service after being moved to another ministry.

This is also not the first time an officer of the Finance Secretary level moved to other than the top 4 ministries located at Raisina Hills (the other three are Home, Defence and External Affairs). In 2014, the then Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram was moved first to Tourism and later to the Minority Affairs Ministry.

On Wednesday, the government had effected a major bureaucratic reshuffle, the first one since the formation of Modi 2.0 government. It assigned new postings to 12 Secretaries and also upgraded 12 officers to the rank of Special Secretary. The senior most Secretary in the Finance Ministry Garg was moved to the Power Ministry while Department of Investment and Public Asset Management Secretary Atanu Chakraborty was appointed as his replacement.

Though what prompted Garg to apply for early retirement, despite having more than an year of service left, remains unknown, it is believed that he was not very happy with the new posting as it is seen as ‘demotion’.

Garg had his differences with the Reserve Bank of India, first with outgoing Deputy Governor Viral Acharya and then with Jalan Committee on Economic Capital Framework. Last November, when Acharya raised issues related with RBI’s autonomy citing examples of other countries where the monetary authority was undermined, Garg had tweeted, “Rupee trading at less than 73 to a dollar, Brent crude below $73 a barrel, markets up by over 4 per cent during the week and bond yields below 7.8 per cent. Wrath of the markets?”

He is also believed to have given a dissent note to the Jalan Committee, which was set up to suggest how much of the RBI’s reserves could be transferred to the government.

Garg is a 1983 batch Indian Administrative Service Officer of the Rajasthan cadre. He became Economic Affairs Secretary on June 21, 2017 and last year he was designated as Finance Secretary as he was the senior most among all the five secretaries (Economic Affairs, Revenue, Financial Services, Expenditure and Investment and Public Asset Management) of the Finance Ministry.

Now, either Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar or Revenue Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey is likely to be designated as Finance Secretary.

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