West Bengal cabinet rejig: Manas Bhunia, Babul Supriyo, Chandrima Bhattacharya get additional charges
Times of India | 9 August 2024
Babul Supriyo, who heads information technology and electronics, will also be holding charge of public enterprises and industrial reconst ruction department. KOLKATA: The Bengal cabinet saw a reshuffle on Wednesday with Manas Bhunia being given charge of the irrigation department. Bhunia, who is minister for water resou-rces investigation and development, will now head both departments.
The irrigation department was with CM Mamata Banerjee since Partha Bhowmick, who earlier held the charge, was elected MP from Barrackpore constituency in the recent Lok Sabha elections and had to resign as minister.
Chandrima Bhattacharya, who is MoS independent charge of the finance and programme monitoring departments, additionally got environment, which was earlier with Ghulam Rabbani. Bhattacharya is also MoS of health, land and land reforms, refugee relief and rehabilitation as well as planning and statistics departments.
Babul Supriyo, who heads information technology and electronics, will also be holding charge of public enterprises and industrial reconstruction department. Rabanni will head the non-conventional and renewable energy department.
The CM had recently expressed displeasure at Raj Bhavan not approving a cabinet rejig though the file was sent to governor C V Ananda Bose on July 10.
On Monday, Raj Bhavan cleared the decks for a reshuffle and also posted on social media that it had accepted the resignation of Akhil Giri, who was jail minister.
Banerjee will hold the jail portfolio for the time being. A source hinted that new ministers were likely to be inducted and the department would go to one of them.
An official said since this was a routine rejig of portfolios and all four were already ministers, no new administration of oath would be required. So no further communication was needed with Raj Bhavan, as the governor had already cleared the reshuffle.