Senior IAS officer Aruna Sundararajan has been appointed as Electronics & IT secretary as part of a major top-level bureaucratic reshuffle effected by the NDA government. A total of 15 new secretaries have been appointed in various central government ministries.
The portfolios of Sundararajan and Aruna Sharma, who is Electronics & IT secretary, have been swapped. Aruna Sharma will now be Steel secretary and Sundarajan will be secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
A Kerala cadre IAS officer of 1982 batch, Aruna Sundararajan has served in various capacities. As a Kerala IT secretary, she left her footprints on the state’s e-governance and e-literacy programmes. In fact, she was instrumental in establishing state’s IT department way back in 1998.
Before being elevated to ministry of Steel as secretary in October last year, she was part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi Digital India vision team. She headed Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL), an organisation tasked with building the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) to take high-speed broadband connectivity to 2.5 lakh gram panchayats.