Tirumurti, who joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1985, will be the 22nd Permanent Representative of India to UN.
Veteran diplomat T. S. Tirumurti will be the new Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, the American Bazaar has learned. An announcement confirming the appointment is likely to come this week, according to a source in New Delhi.
Tirumurti, who currently serves as the Secretary of Economic Relations at the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi, will succeed the retiring diplomat Syed Akbaruddin.
Tirumurti, a 35-year Indian Foreign Service veteran, will be the 22nd Permanent Representative of India to the world body.
The 58-year-old will start his new job at critical time, when nations all over the world are fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, which has so far claimed more than 200,000 lives globally and destroyed economies worldwide.
Tirumurti, who joined the IFS in 1985, has served in Indian missions in several countries. Prior to assuming charge as the secretary at the ministry in February 2018, he served as the Indian High Commissioner to Malaysia for more than four years.
He also served as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Jakarta.
The UN posting will be Tirumurti’s second in the United States. He has also served at the Embassy of India in Washington, DC.
Akbaruddin has been serving as India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations at New York since January 2016.
Many distinguished diplomats have served in the position, including G. Parthasarathy, Brajesh Mishra, Hamid Ansari and Hardeep Singh Puri, who’s currently a minister of state for civil aviation and urban affairs.
Tirumurti has also written three books.
His first book, Kissing the Heavens: The Kailash–Manasarovar Yatra, published in 1999, documents the diplomat’s experience working as a liaison officer on the Kailash-Mansarovar yatra in 1997. Clive Avenue (2002) and Chennaivaasi (2012) are works of fiction.
Tirumurti is married to Gowri, a former Indian junior tennis champion. They have two children.
Gowri Tirumurti is the daughter of tennis legend Ramanathan Krishnan and the sister of former junior Wimbledon and French Open champion Ramesh Krishnan.