Hasmukh Adhia, the finance secretary who played a pivotal role in the implementation of the Goods and Service Tax (GST) regime, is serving his last day in office on Friday.

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He announced his retirement in mid-November on social media platform Twitter.

"I retire on 30th November with a sense of great satisfaction for what I could do for the country. I am grateful to all those officers and staff who worked with me. My special gratitude to Prime Minister for his guidance and to Arun Jaitley for having acknowledged my contribution publicly," Adhia tweeted.

A 1981-batch Gujarat cadre officer of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS), Adhia moved to New Delhi in November 2014 as the secretary in the department of financial services after Narendra Modi became the prime minister. He is an MBA graduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru.

In his four-year stint in the union finance ministry, Adhia served as the revenue and finance secretary, where he and his team spearheaded the implementation of the newly adopted GST tax regime.

Giving credit to Adhia for implementing the GST tax regime, Jaitley in his Facebook post said, "It was his efforts supported by his team of officers of centre and state governments, which made it possible to hit the deadline of 1st July 2017. Rate reductions and smoothening of the rough edges were also achieved in a record time."

He was known for the formulation of various social sector programmes of the NDA government and has also worked closely with Modi himself.

When he was the revenue secretary, Adhia was recognised for living up to his promise of simplifying the tax rules and procedures under the tax laws and cleaning up the department.

"The campaign against black money both within and outside the country was the initial highlight of the revenue department," Jaitley said in the blog post. Jaitley also noted that the Income Tax Department now functions online with no physical interface between the assessee and the assessment official.

Apart from his stint with the government, Adhia is known to be yoga enthusiast and is also the author of two books on human resource management — My Notes to Myself: Simple tips on human resource management taken from the diary of a bureaucrat and Reinventing Government through HRM Strategies. He also has his own website http://adhia.org/.

First Published:Nov 30, 2018 1:27 PM IST