Senior IAS officer Ajay Tyagi on Wednesday took charge as the Chairman of the markets regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).
He is the ninth Chairman of the Sebi 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.
A 1984 batch IAS officer of Himachal Pradesh cadre, he has handled capital markets division in the Finance Ministry.
He visited the famous Shree Siddhivinayak Ganapati temple here before taking charge.
Tyagi has diverse experience at the Centre. He was Joint Secretary in Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change before joining Finance Ministry in November 2014 as Additional Secretary. He has also worked in ministries of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Steel and Rural Development.
A native of Uttar Pradesh, he had done post graduation in Economics. He did Master's in Public Administration from Harvard and holds Master's degree in Technology (Computer Science), as per his official resume.
With a tenure spanning six years, Sinha was the second longest serving Sebi chief after D R Mehta's seven-year term from 1995 to 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.