Girija Subramanian, CMD,Agriculture Insurance Company

This is also for the first time that a serving CMD of a PSU entity again participated in the selection exercise meant to choose a CMD of another PSU insurer

New Delhi:

The Financial Services Institutions Bureau(FSIB), the head hunting agency for the players of PSU financial sector services, on Thursday, has selected Girija Subramanian, CMD, Agriculture Insurance Company(AIC) and Bhupesh Sushil Rahul, general manger, AIC as the next CMD of New India Assurance and and United India Insurance respectively.

The FSIB had conducted virtual interviews over two days since Wednesday to choose two CMDs and nine executive directors for across the PSU insurers including GIC Re and AIC.

The department of financial services (DFS), earlier, had shortlisted Subramanian and six general managers (GMs) across the companies for selection of two CMDs.

While the post of CMD at UII is already vacant after S Tripathy retired in Feb end, the top post at NIA will fall vacant after Neerja Kapur retires in Apr end.

Subramanian is originally from General Insurance Corporation ( batch of 1988) and was appointed as CMD of AIC in Sept 2022 and will get a tenure of over two years in NIA while Rahul, who had again joined Crop cell of GIC in 1989, has been all along with AIC through out his career and will be retiring in Apr 2027.

Meanwhile, the FSIB, for the first time, has selected nine executive directors for PSU general insurers including GIC Re and AIC. They are- Rashmi Bajpai and Amit Misra for Oriental Insurance Company(OIC), HJ Joshi, Radhika C. S for GIC Re, T. Babu Paul and C. G Prasad for National Insurance Company (NICL), Sunita Gupta and P. C. Gothwal for UII, Dasarathi Singh for AIC. 25 general managers from across the companies were in the race for nine posts of EDs.

After conducting a few scrutiny, all these names will now be sent to the department of financial services (DFS) which in turn will send them to Appointments Committee of Cabinet(ACC), headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for the final approvals.

Normally, it takes over two months for all the approvals to be in place. With elections around, it may take longer time as the PM will be busy in campaigning, said sources at the ministry of finance(MoF).

The six general managers who were shortlisted for the selections of two CMDs are – Rahul, Hitesh Joshi, Jayshree Bala and V Balkrishna from GIC Re, Sunita Gupta and Rekha Solanki from Oriental Insurance Company(OIC) for selecting two CMDs. Joshi along with Subramanian were only interviewed for NIA.

This is also for the first time that a serving CMD of a PSU entity once again participated in the selection exercise meant to choose a CMD of another PSU insurer.

Earlier, there have been instances, where CMD of one PSU general insurer had been shifted to another PSU general insurer by an executive order of the department of financial services(DFS) duly approved by the ACC.