Sitharaman insisted on my transfer from MoF: Garg

New Delhi, Oct 31 : Former Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg has claimed that Nirmala Sitharaman asked for and insisted on his transfer from the Ministry of Finance in June 2019 itself, within a month of taking over as the Union Finance Minister.
Giving reasons for taking voluntary retirement from government service last year, Garg wrote in a blog: “Quite frankly, I did not share a good and productive working relationship with the new Finance Minister and I did not want to work anywhere outside the Ministry of Finance.” Profusely praising late Arun Jaitley as the Finance Minister, Garg said that with the new incumbent Sitharaman “it became quite apparent very early that working with her was going to be quite difficult and it may not be conducive to undertaking necessary reforms for the attainment of the objective of building a $10 trillion economy of India”.
Garg said that Sitharaman had “pre-conceived notions” about him. “She, for reasons not very clearly known to me, came with some pre-conceived notions about me. She did not seem to have confidence in me. She was not quite comfortable working with me as well.” The retired officer also talked about serious differences between the two.
“Serious difference also developed on some key issues like economic capital framework of the RBI, package for dealing with problems of non-banks, resolution of non-banks, partial credit guarantee scheme, capitalisation of non-banks like IIFCL and other financial entities and the like,” Garg wrote.