Kolkata, May 10 (IANS) Within less than 24 hours of taking oath, newly sworn‑in West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has carried out a sweeping overhaul of the bureaucratic structure in the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) at the state secretariat.

As many as 16 bureaucrats attached to the earlier CMO led by former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee have been replaced by new officers. Of these, the most prominent name among the erstwhile officers who have been shifted out of the CMO is Santanu Mukhopadhya, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 2014 batch and also considered an extremely close confidant of Mamata Banerjee.

Staff attached to the erstwhile Mamata Banerjee-headed CMO, Pratap Nayek, who is also the all-in-all in the Trinamool Congress-affiliated West Bengal Government Employees’ Federation, had been transferred to the faraway Palbazar Block Development office at Bijanbari in Darjeeling district in North Bengal.

At the same time, as many as 46 officers serving as principal secretaries to the previous cabinet have been placed with the state personnel & administrative reforms department for the time being. It will be decided later where these officers will be placed next.

On Saturday, just hours after the oath ceremony of Suvendu Adhikari, Subrata Gupta, a retired IAS officer, whose role as the Election Commission of India (ECI)-appointed special poll observer for the recently concluded West Bengal Assembly polls and received praise from all quarters, was appointed as the advisor to the new and ninth Chief Minister of West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari.

The new government on Saturday announced the appointment of Subrata Bala, an IAS officer of the 2017 batch of West Bengal, as the Principal Secretary to Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. His earlier assignment was as the Additional District Magistrate of South 24 Parganas.

Meanwhile, Kolkata Police authorities have transferred as many as 93 officers from the ranks of sub-inspectors, inspectors, assistant commissioners, and deputy commissioners out of the city police’s jurisdiction.

Most of these officers who have been transferred were influential in the Trinamool Congress-affiliated Police Welfare Association.

These 93 officers have been transferred to various places like Cooch Behar, Kalimpong, Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, and Alipurduar in North Bengal, Sunderbans in South 24 Parganas district, and the tribal-dominated districts in the Western Sector of West Bengal, namely Bankura and Purulia.

–IANS

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