Retired IAS officer of UP cadre of 1981 batch, Parameswaran Iyer has been appointed as the new CEO of Niti Aayog. He will take place of outgoing Amitabh Kant whose six year tenure ends on June 30. Iyer played a very key role in the rollout of the Swachh Bharat mission, Modi governments’ one of the most ambitious project.
According to a notification issued by the Department of Personnel and Training, Iyer’s initial tenure will be for two years.
Iyer, 63, entered the Indian Administrative Service in 1981 and took a voluntary retirement in 2009 to join the water and sanitation initiatives at the World Bank. He served as the Global Lead for Strategic Initiatives in the World Bank’s Water Global Practice. In 2016, he returned to India and was appointed by the government to head the drinking and sanitation department, and lead the Swachh Bharat Mission.
Iyer was born in Srinagar and his father was an Indian Air Force officer. He was educated at The Doon School in Dehradun, and then attended St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. As a student of St Stephen’s college he represented India at the Junior Davis Cup in Tennis. He then got a one-year exchange scholarship at Davidson College in North Carolina.
While Amitabh Kant, a 1980-batch retired IAS officer of Kerala cadre, took over as the NITI Aayog CEO in 2016. He last got an extension, by a year, in June 2021. During his time at the organisation, Kant drove the policy push in areas related to industrial development, technology and investment. He is seen as having played a key role in the government’s flagship ‘Make in India’ scheme and was also behind the Aspirational Districts Programme, which was targetted at improving the socio-economic outcomes in some of the most backward districts.
Iyer, who served as the secretary of the department of drinking water and sanitation, led from the front and in February 2017, he got inside a twin-pit toilet to empty it at a village in Telangana to help people overcome the taboo of cleaning toilets. PM Modi had termed his act as ‘remarkable’ during one of his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ programmes. In July 2020, Iyer resigned as the drinking water and sanitation secretary, citing personal reasons.
