The 63-year old Omita Paul, a close aide of Pranab Mukherjee since 1980, is the first to be appointed as the Secretary to the President immediately after he was sworn in on Wednesday. She had resigned as the most powerful adviser to Mukherjee just before he resigned as the Finance Minister.

Mukherjee had put in the word for her appointment to the Prime Minister beforehand and so the Appointments Committee of Cabinet (ACC) headed by the PM approved her employment on the contract basis, with her tenure co-terminus with the tenure of the President. An IIS (Indian Information Service) officer of the 1973 batch, she had taken voluntary retirement in 2002 to continue to work with Mukherjee.

She replaces Christy Leon Fernandes, a 1973 batch retired IAS officer of Gujarat cadre, who was taken as the Secretary to the President by Pratibha Patil in July 2007 after she took over as the President. Christy was the union tourism secretary at the time and retired in 2009.

Omita Paul is one person Mukherjee has trusted in all his official work since she is one who knew his thought process to the minutest detail she picked up from years of association since 1982 when he was the commerce minister. When he became the finance minister in 1982, Paul was his director, public relations. When he became th deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, she became his officer-on-special duty and followed him in the commerce and external affairs ministry.

When Mukherjee became the first defence minister in the UPA government, Omita came out of retirement to become his adviser and since then followed him in the external affairs and finance ministries.

Whenever Omita Paul's intervention in some key decisions was objected by the senior IAS bureaucrats, Mukherjee used to tell them that she knows best what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. She knew intimately Mukherjee’s likes and dislikes. For instance, Mukherjee, though deeply religious, doesn’t like public servants wearing religious marks, threads and charms. Paul would make sure that officers who met Mukherjee hid their religious markings.

It was another matter that she was not there by his side when he was driven down ceremoniously to the Parliament House for being sworn in as he displayed a small "tilak" on his forehead, possibly planted by the family when he left his old bungalow for the last time in the morning.