Cheema made GTA Principal Secy

Kolkata: In a minor reshuffle in the IAS cadre in Bengal, Kanwaljeet Singh Cheema has been appointed as Principal Secretary of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA).

Cheema, the IAS officer of 1993 batch, will replace Barun Kumar Ray, who was given the additional charge of GTA's principal secretary in June.

Cheema was the Principal Secretary of the Mass Education and Library Services department. IAS officer of 1993 batch, Anoop Kumar Agrawal, will be the Principal Secretary of the Mass Education department. He was the Principal Secretary of the Planning, Statistics and Programme Monitoring Department. Manish Jain, who is the Secretary of the Tourism Department, will be having the additional charge of the Planning, Statistic and Programme Implementation Department.

This comes at the time when the GTA has decided to introduce administrative calendar according to which all work needs to be complete. It may be mentioned that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had introduced the system of administrative calendar soon after coming to power. According to sources, the step has been taken so that the pending work for an overall development of the Hills can be completed within a stipulated time after it remained suspended for a long time in the past few months following the unrest over Gorkhaland. Concerned officials have to follow the administrative calendar and according to which they need to take necessary steps to ensure that the work is done as per the calendar.

This is the first time when such a step has been taken to ensure development of the Hills and this comes after Binay Tamang was made Chairman and Anit Thapa the Vice Chairman of the Board of Administrators to run the GTA.