New Delhi:
After a bit of delay, government on Monday has appointed Tajinder Mukherjee,general manager, New India Assurance(NIA), as the CMD of Kolkata based National Insurance company while Girish Radhakrishnan, CEO, NIA’s London operation, has been named as the CMD of Chennai based United India Insurance
Incidentally, both have same number of years as residual services and will be retiring in June 2021.
However , government has not named anybody as the CMD of NIA,a listed entity, though interviews for all the three posts were held on the same day.The post is lying vacant since G Srinivasan retired from the post in July end.
Of late,there have been speculations that Prime Minister Office is toying with an idea to appoint a private sector proessional to head NIA, much like government has done in the banking sector. It effectively means the post of NIA CMD will be advertised again and prIvate sector proessionals will be allowed to apply.
The analysts have raised caution on appointing a private sector professinal to head the largest public sector general insurance company by saying that such an experiment has not contributed anuthing to the public sector banking industry.
There are other speculations that the senior most CMD in the PSU general insurance industry, AV Grija Kumar,CMD, Oriental Insrance Company, may be shifted to the NIA. Tradionally,the NIA is always headed by the senior most CMD and earler, many a times, CMDs of other three PSU general insurance companies, have been shifted to th NIA on this ground.
Going by the names government has chosen for NIC and UII, it is clear that it has not gone by seniority rules. Secondly, by choosing officers those who are having more than two and half years, to head the companies, who are merger candidates, it is now clear that the merger is off the radar of the government for now, said industry analysts.
There were 10 senior officials from four PSU general insurers who had appeared for the interviews held on May 18 to select three CMDs.
The MOF had short-listed 10 names: Hemant G Rokade, general manager & director, NIA, three senior most GMs of Delhi-based Agriculture Insurance Company (AIC) — Malay K Poddar, Rajeev Chaudhry, Avinanda Ghosh — Dinesh Waghela, GM of GIC Re, Siddharth Pradhan, GM of NIA, Girish Radhakrishnan, GM of NIA, Atul Sahai,GM of Oriental Insurance Company (OIC), Tajinder Mukherjee, GM of NIA and SN Rajeswari, GM of NIA.