Senior IAS officer Rajeev Ranjan was named as the next chief secretary by the Tamil Nadu government on Sunday. He will be replacing K Shanmugam who will be retiring from the post but will continue as an advisor to the government for a year. Last week, the Union government had approved the repatriation of the IAS officer to his parent cadre on the state government's request.
Ranjan belongs to the 1984 batch of IAS cadre and has held several posts in his 35 years of service. His last posting in the state was as Additional Chief Secretary (Highways) between 2013 and 2018. He was Principal Secretary in the same department before that and had worked directly under Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami who has held the post of Highways Minister since 2011. Before that, he had been the Principal Secretary (Industries) and Chairman of the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation.
He began his services as the Tiruvannamalai Sub-Collector between 1987 and 1989 following which he was made the Tiruchi Collector. He then switched to the national cadre and became the Director and Joint Secretary in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion of the Union Ministry of Industries Commerce. He held this post from April 2000 to June 2007 and was reportedly involved in revamping intellectual property laws.
In September 2018, he was posted in the GST council as Special Secretary. According to The Hindu, he introduced the e-invoicing system, streamlining of the procedures for taxpayers and sharing of data and data analytics to prevent tax evasion. He later became the Fisheries secretary in March 2020.
Ranjan got his graduation degree in physics from Patna University and completed his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. He even went on to get a postgraduate degree in public policy from the London School of Economics and has done a PhD in management.