Finance secretary

The term Finance Secretary might refer to:

Finance Secretary

The Finance Secretary is the Permanent Secretary-level civil servant, who plays a leadership role in the bureaucracy of the Finance Ministry, Government of India.

Ratan Watal is current Finance Secretary who replaced Rajiv Mehrishi.

Overview

The Ministry of Finance is composed of five departments the Department of Economic Affairs, the Department of Revenue, the Department of Expenditure, the Department of Financial Services and Department of Disinvestment. Each of the departments is headed by a secretary. Each of the five secretaries directly reports to the finance minister.

The "Finance Secretary" (FS) is a tag given to one of the five secretaries. It only denotes a first among equals. The other four secretaries do not report to the FS; their files do not flow through him.

By default, the FS tends to be the senior most of the five, where seniority is defined by the year of entry into the civil service and not age. Sometimes, none of the five is labelled FS.

Most finance secretaries have been members of the Indian Administrative Service or IAS, but some of them have been career economists. The last finance secretary of India was Mr. Arun Ramanathan, an IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu Cadre. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Duvvuri Subba Rao, Bimal Jalan , Manmohan Singh , K. G. Ambegaokar , S Venkitaramanan,and Vijay Kelkar are some of the best known finance secretaries.