4 officers of CEO West Bengal Office Shifted

Kolkata: Close on the heels of an unprecedented bureaucratic reshuffle by the Election Commission in the Mamata Banerjee government before the Assembly Election in West Bengal, now heads have rolled at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal also.

On Monday, four key officials at the poll body faced transfer to different departments following instructions by Manoj Agarwal, the CEO, West Bengal. They were Subrata Pal, deputy CEO, two additional secretaries, Narendra Nath Dutta and Supriya Das, and joint secretary Mithu Sarkar.

All of them are West Bengal Civil Service (WBCS) officers of various batches. Why they were shifted out of the CEO office is yet to be unknown. Their new appointments were announced by the state government in a notification.

Mr Pal has been made senior deputy secretary of the state health department. He had been serving as deputy CEO since 2018. On the other hand, Kallol Nath, who was the additional secretary of the health department, has been assigned as joint CEO, West Bengal.

Among others, Mr Dutta has been sent to the state labour department as its additional secretary while Mr Das has been posted as additional secretary at food processing industries and horticulture department.

Mr Sarkar has been appointed as the joint secretary at the minority affairs and madrasah education department. Within a few hours of the transfer, chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s MP nephew Abhishek Banerjee and two state ministers, Chandrima Bhattacharya and Shashi Panja, met Mr Agarwal over the fraudulent applications allegedly by BJP for deletions of the voters' names in form 6.

TMC supporters also held a demonstration outside the office of CEO, West Bengal leading to the deployment of central forces in the evening. Mr Banerjee later tore into the BJP for the dubious role.