Dalit IAS officer K Rathna Prabha is Karnataka's new Chief Secretary

Bengaluru: The state government has appointed senior IAS officer K Rathna Prabha as the new Chief Secretary and T M Vijay Bhaskar as the Additional Chief Secretary here on November 28.

Present Chief Secretary Dr. Subhashchandra Kuntiya is set to retire this month end. Ratna Prabha is the third woman chief secretary of the state after Teresa Bhattacharya (2000) and Malathi Das (2006) and will head the state administrative machinery till March 2018. T M Vijay Bhaskar, a 1983 batch IAS officer, is junior to Ratna Prabha.

Senior officers S K Patnakay, Vijay Bhasker and Rathna Prabha were the front runners to head the state's bureaucracy.Rathna Prabha, a dalit who hails from Andhra Pradesh is 1981 IAS officer.It is learnt that Siddaramaiah, who prides himself as a champion of Dalits and backward classes, could not commit the mistake of denying a Dalit woman IAS officer the chance to be the chief secretary.

The Congress government is also wary of the political impact if it ignores her for the post as the opposition BJP and JD(S) would exploit it politically to paint Congress as anti-Dalit with only pseudo sympathy for Dalits.