Ajay Tyagi replaces U K Sinha as SEBI Chairman

A 1984 batch IAS officer of Himachal Pradesh cadre, Tyagi was additional secretary in the department of economic affairs.

Mumbai, Mar 1: Senior IAS officer Ajay Tyagi on Wednesday assumed office as the chairman of markets regulator SEBI. He is the ninth chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India and has taken over from U K Sinha, who completed his six-year tenure.

The appointment of 58-year-old Tyagi, who is known to keep a low profile, is for a period of three years. He visited the famous Shree Siddhivinayak Ganapati temple in Mumbai before taking charge.

Prior to this appointment, Tyagi was additional secretary in the department of economic affairs. In that role, he was handling capital market, investment, infrastructure as well as currency and coinage divisions. He was joint secretary in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change before joining the Finance Ministry in November 2014 as additional secretary.

He has also worked in ministries of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Steel and Rural Development. A 1984 batch IAS officer of Himachal Pradesh cadre, Tyagi did his graduation in Electrical Engineering and post graduation in Computer Science.

He also did his Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University. With a tenure spanning six years, Sinha was the second longest serving Sebi chief after D R Mehta, whose seven-year term was from 1995 till 2002. Sinha's three predecessors -- C B Bhave, M Damodaran and G N Bajpai -- had tenures of three years each.

Sebi, besides regulating stock exchanges, also supervises various kinds of market entities including brokers, mutual funds, FIIs, rating agencies and investment bankers, as also thousands of listed companies.

PTI