Kolkata confidential

Buladi goes mute
Buladi has stopped talking. The mascot for anti-AIDS campaign in the state, a middle-aged housewife who is shown on billboards and hoardings displaying anti-AIDS campaigns, with a helpline attached to it, is not answering phone calls from the people in distress. And the grapevine is attributing several factors to it.
Change of guards at the West Bengal State Aids Prevention and Control Society, where the project director has changed, and the Department of Health, which has got a principal secretary now, are some of them. “We are trying to restore Buladi’s voice as soon as possible,” said a Health department official.

‘Cash fine’
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is trying to usher in modernism and corporate style in his government, but one thing that he could not change is the age-old practice of paying salary to government employees in cash. On the last day of every month, let alone general employees, even senior officers are seen counting wads of notes before going home. The government had tried to introduce the system of Electronic Clearing Service, but the Coordination Committee affiliated to the CPM stalled it, saying the new system would lead to retrenchment. Grapevine at the Writers’ Buildings has it that the committee opposed it for the fear of losing subscription from the employees. They feared that if the salaries go to the employees’ bank accounts directly, many of them would not pay their subscriptions or contributions to the committee’s coffers.

Inconclusive JU
Jadavpur University has set aside the report of the one-man inquiry committee headed by the then principal secretary, Higher Education, Asok Mohan Chakrabarti to look into the reasons of violence on the campus on April 5, 2007, saying it was ‘unwarranted, irrelevant and not conducive to the future the student-teacher-employees relationship’. The committee had left the authorities red faced pointing fingers on the role of university employees.
The report was placed before the university’s executive council at the end of 2007, but the university had put the matter on hold.
Within a couple of months of Chakrabarti taking charge as home secretary, the university claimed that there has been no conclusion drawn in the report so the university is unable to take any decision.

Tearful adieu
It was a scene that the Writers’ Buildings will remember for days. As Samar Ghosh, the out-going principal secretary, Finance, left on the last day of his office, a huge entourage of officials and employees followed him in a procession, many wiping their tears for the boss who spent 18 years in the department.
Ghosh, who has been transferred to the Department of Health following his tiff with Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta, was also in tears while bidding good bye to his colleagues.