Jobs cleared in poll hurry

KOLKATA: Finance minister Asim Dasgupta has cleared a pile of recruitment files in the last few days, even ones his senior bureaucrats had reservations about, say sources. With the electoral code of conduct expected to take effect in the first days of March, the Left Front government seems to be in a hurry to fill up vacancies.
The timing of the recruitment coincides with the worst fiscal crisis Bengal has seen.The 34-year-old Left regime has run up a debt of around Rs 1.9 lakh crore and is desperate for a bailout from the Centre. The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee administration has its eyes on the election, never mind if it is struggling to pay salaries.
On Tuesday alone, the state Cabinet cleared the creation of 3,221 new posts 1,675 of them for the health department.
There was some semblance of transparency and procedure in these sanctions cleared by the council of ministers but many orders were passed by the finance minister on his own, say sources. One of them was filling up of 1,474 vacancies in the irrigation department.
It triggered a hue and cry when the proposal was first placed in the Cabinet in 2006. Dasgupta set up a probe committee, headed by joint secretary (finance) Swapan Chatterjee, which found "gross irregularities" in the recruitment process. Some of the recruits were not even eligible for the posts, the report said. Finance secretary C M Bachhawat seconded the findings. The matter was then referred to chief secretary Samar Ghosh. He, too, found the hiring process "highly irregular".
Finance department officials took it up with the chief secretary on Wednesday and showed him the order passed by Dasgupta. Both the finance secretary's and the chief secretary's notes on the "illegal recruitments" were ignored.
Irrigation minister Subhas Naskar defended the mass recruitment: "It was long overdue. We have more than 4,000 vacancies in our department. I wish some more recruitments could have been made now." Asked about the probe reports, he said: "There were some allegations for which a probe committee had been set up. I don't know the exact status."
Another controversial order of the finance minister is the regularizing of 64 temporary teachers in the technical education department. Department secretary Manoj Agarwal had objected to it but Dasgupta tried to have the file cleared, say sources. An official said: "He sought signatures of some officials, but nobody complied. He then sent the file to the advocate general's office."
Agarwal told TOI, "There were certain issues regarding regularizing these jobs. Issues that needed to be addressed and probed. I don't know if the file has been cleared because I am in Delhi."
Some finance department officials have made photocopies of the orders that were "passed in a hurry" and plan to send them to the Election Commission, say sources. The government has been on a recruitment overdrive since last year when it created 17,000 new posts.