Amid the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the State, the Tamil Nadu government on Friday replaced Health Secretary Beela Rajesh, bringing in senior IAS officer J. Radhakrishnan in her place. Ms. Rajesh was posted as Secretary, Commercial Taxes and Registration Department.
Mr. Radhakrishnan is no stranger to the Health Department. Incidentally, he was Ms. Rajesh’s predecessor in the department, serving as Secretary between 2012 and February 2019. He will continue to hold additional charge as Secretary-cum-Commissioner, Revenue Administration.
Managing disaster
He shot into prominence for effectively handling tsunami relief and rebuilding works in coastal Nagapattinam during 2004-05.
Early last month, as Chennai turned a hotspot for COVID-19, the government appointed him as a Special Nodal Officer to co-ordinate COVID-19-related issues with the Commissioner of GCC and other teams formed to tackle the spread of the disease.
The bureaucratic reshuffle came on a day Tamil Nadu’s COVID-19 tally breached the 40,000-mark and against the backdrop of consistently rising cases in Chennai.
The capital city has been registering new cases of COVID-19 in four-figure numbers, on a daily basis, for the past many days.
Sources contended that the government put Mr. Radhakrishnan at the helm so that his experience in disaster management could come in handy to device micro strategies to arrest the spread of COVID-19.
