Krishnagar administrator’s lens on ‘missing’ civic workers
The Statesman | 20 November 2025
Krishnagar’s long-running municipal paralysis has taken a startling turn with civic administrator and Sadar Sub-Divisional Officer Sharadwati Choudhury discovering massive discrepancies in staff records.
While nearly a thousand sanitation workers appear on the municipality’s rolls, barely 300 to 400 are visible on the ground. The administrator, who has been personally inspecting neighbourhoods and supervising cleaning operations, was blunt in her assessment: if so many workers exist on paper, why is the city buried under garbage?
For more than two years, factionalism within the board reduced the century-old municipality to near standstill. Garbage piles grew, drains clogged and civic services collapsed amid persistent infighting. Multiple attempts by the party to resolve the crisis, including a September meeting in Kolkata with senior leadership, failed to restore order. After repeated setbacks, the board was dissolved and Choudhury was appointed administrator, following a brief interim period under Naresh Das.
Since taking charge, Choudhury has been touring the town almost daily, travelling in totos and municipal vehicles, speaking directly with sanitation workers and spending long hours at the municipal office examining payrolls and work logs. Her review exposed what officials privately describe as one of the municipality’s worst-kept secrets: a large number of “casual workers” drawing salaries without documents, duties or accountability.
Municipal records claim the presence of permanent sanitation workers, Nirmal Bandhus, Nirmal Sathis and hundreds of additional staff. But union leaders say only around 370 of these are genuine field workers. The rest, they allege, are names inserted over years at the behest of local political leaders and councillors.
Rajkishore Das, president of the Trinamul-affiliated municipal employees’ union, said the situation had been explained to the administrator. According to him, only a small fraction belong to the traditional sanitation workforce, while the majority “sit idle, roam around and collect wages at the end of the month”, often without any link to the communities typically involved in sanitation labour. Their inclusion, he said, was a long-standing misuse of the system.
Municipal sources admit that many such casual workers have no appointment letters, attendance records or work details. Their reporting hours are unknown, yet salaries are processed without interruption, raising questions about who controls this parallel workforce.
Choudhury, however, is proceeding with caution. She said the government had entrusted her with restoring basic services and that citizens expected immediate improvement. Water supply, street lighting, garbage removal, building plan approvals and trade licences have been restarted, but the staff structure requires urgent scrutiny. She confirmed receiving a list of about a thousand workers and said discrepancies were already evident. Only those working in the field would be retained, she said, and the rest would face action once verification was complete.