CHENNAI: Senior IAS officer T Udayachandran, widely seen as one of the most influential bureaucrats during the previous DMK government, was shifted from the post of finance secretary on Tuesday. He has been replaced by another senior IAS officer, MA Siddique, who currently serves as the managing director of Chennai Metro Rail Limited.
In its first major bureaucratic reshuffle, the state government also appointed former chief secretary N Muruganandam as the commissioner of Revenue Administration and Disaster Management. Earlier, Muruganandam was transferred by the Election Commission of India (ECI) during the Assembly election. He replaced P Amutha, who was holding the additional charge.
Siddique, a 1995 batch IAS officer, has held various roles in the finance department over the past two decades. He joined the department as an under secretary in 1998, served as deputy secretary in Finance from 1999 to 2002, acting as the state’s budget officer, and later held the position of principal secretary (Expenditure) in the Finance department from 2017 to 2019.
He also served as commissioner of Commercial Taxes from 2019 to 2021 and as commissioner of Revenue Administration from December 2021 before taking up his current role as managing director of CMRL in June 2022.
S Swarna, State Project Director of the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA), has been transferred and will take over as secretary of Tourism, Culture, and Religious Endowments department. Meanwhile, Nanthakumar, registrar of Cooperative Societies, will assume the role of managing director of Tasmac, replacing T Christuraj, said the order.