Nabanna orders departments to report contractual Group D hiring by 6 November

West Bengal's government has ordered all departments to send it details of the contractual Group D staff they have hired, to check whether the recruitment followed the rules, Sangbad Pratidin reported on Saturday.

Departments must submit the information in a fixed format by 6 November, according to the newspaper, which cited senior officials at Nabanna, the state secretariat. The check will measure each appointment against a government order of 16 September 2011 that set out how contractual Group D staff, the lowest grade of government employees, should be hired, including its sections 9, 11 and 14. The Irrigation Department's records will be examined first, the report said.

The review covers hiring under the previous Trinamool Congress government. The BJP government led by Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has made allegations of irregular recruitment under its predecessor a central political theme. No figure for the number of contractual Group D staff in state departments has been given.

Contract workers' representatives said they did not oppose the exercise. "We too want it to come out whether recruitment was done according to the rules," Manoj Chakraborty, chief adviser to the All Bengal Contractual Employees Association, told Sangbad Pratidin. He also asked the government to make the workers permanent.

The government has not issued a public statement on the order, and the Trinamool Congress had not responded to the report by Sunday morning.