340 applicants get jobs on compassionate grounds in PWD

Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee-government has given jobs to 340 applicants on compassionate grounds in the past two years in the Public Works Department (PWD). Around 550 applications were lying pending since the time of the Left Front government.

Next to the kin of the job applicants died while on duty. But they had to continue toiling for years during the Left Front government as most of the 550 job applicants had approached the state government between 2000 and 2011.

Despite running pillar to post, no one pay heed to their requests to expedite the process of their appointment before the change of guard in the state.

Finally, after the Trinamool Congress government came to power, the Chief Minister had given directions to respective departments so that the matter related to huge number of pending cases related to jobs on compassionate grounds can be resolved at its earliest.

A transparent system has been brought into place and personal hearing to each and every case is given. The concerned officials helped 340 people get jobs on

compassionate grounds just in the past two years. "It took some time to rearrange the entire process and finally the cases that were pending for the past eight to ten years were resolved in just two years," an official said.

Citing an example, the official said that there was an applicant who had submitted her application in 2004 along with all relevant documents to the then assistant engineer under whom her husband was posted.

Her application was rejected by an official but she was never told about it. She used to run from one officer to another for the past ten

years knowing that someday or the other she will be getting the job.

She was in tears when she came to know that her application was rejected ten years ago "without any valid reason" and she had no hopes of getting the job. Her case has been reopened once again and she finally got a job after it was found that her application was rejected for no proper reason ten years ago during the Left Front regime.

In a bid to make the process transparent, a data has been prepared in a new format that is containing all details of the applicants who applied for jobs on compassionate grounds including the present status of the application and it has been made available with all senior officials of the department so that it can be easily accessed as and when required.

The official said that some out of the 550 pending applications were rejected due to lack of necessary documents and other certain reasons. "But we always give effort so that the job on this ground is given within the minimum time which is required to carry out the entire process," the official said.