West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will also be in charge of Home, Health and Family Planning, Land and Land Reforms, Information, Hill Affairs, Minority Affairs and Madrassah Education as was announced at 12. 20 a.m. on Saturday. She and her Council of Ministers were sworn in by the Governor M K Narayanan on Friday.
While the State’s next Finance Minister will be former secretary general of FICCI Amit Mitra, the new Industries and Commerce Minister is Partha Chatterjee. Mr. Chatterjee will be in additional charge of the Parliamentary Affairs department.
Subrata Mukehrjee has been put in charge of the Pubic Health Engineering department. department. Purnendeu Biswas will be the new Labour Minister.
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While Rabindranath Bhattacharjee is the Minister of School Education Bratya Basu will be in charge of Higher Education.
Former Chief Secretary of the State, Manish Gupta is the new Minister for Dvelopment and Planning. Ujjal Biswas will be in charge of Youth Services.
Sabitri Mitra, the only other woman in Ms. Banerjee’s cabinet has been made Minister for Women and Child Development and Social Welfare.
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Sudarshan Ghosh Dastidar will be the next Environment Minister. Former IPS officers H. A. Safwi and Rachpal Singh are to be in charge of Co-operation and Tourism departments respectively.
Manas Bhunia, president of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee is the new Minister for Irrigation. The only other Minister to represent the Congress in the Council of Ministers so far, Abu Hena, was made Minister for Fisheries.
Gautam Deb, a Trinamool Congress MLA elected from Darjeeling district has been made Minister for North Bengal Development while Sukumar Hansda, the party’s MLA from Jhargram in Maoist-affected Paschim Medinipur district will be the new Paschim Anchal Unnayan Affairs. Firhad Hakim is the new Urban Development Minister.
It has also been proposed that Biman Bandhopadhyay will be the new Speaker in the West Bengal Assembly and Sonali Guha Deputy Speaker.
In all, Ms. Banerjee and 37 other Ministers were sworn in at a ceremony at Raj Bhavan on Friday afternoon.