State to audit 3rd-party contractual staffers

Kolkata: State govt has initiated a comprehensive manpower audit of contractual employees engaged across various departments through third-party agencies to assess the actual requirement of such staff and identify possible financial irregularities linked to these appointments.According to sources, the exercise aims to determine the exact number of contractual employees deployed in different govt offices, their nature of work, tenure and the expenditure incurred on their salaries through outsourced agencies.Concerns have been raised over alleged fund leakage and lack of transparency in the recruitment and deployment of several thousand contractual employees supplied by private vendors over the years, said sources."Webel supplied manpower to different govt departments after sourcing from vendors. However, after 2023, Webel stopped participating in tenders. Instead, Webel Technology Ltd (WTL), under the personnel and administrative reforms department, has been supplying manpower to different govt departments," a senior official said.Bengal operates around 4,000 Bangla Sahayata Kendras (BSKs) across 23 districts to provide people access to over 300 govt services and welfare schemes. Every BSK is manned by three contractual employees, and all of them are supplied by third-party vendors, an official said.Adding that there was "no need" for BSKs when Common Service Centres were providing similar services, the official said that many BSKs were functioning with little or no work, leading to a "huge leakage of funds" through salary to nearly 12,000 employees."Govt conducts a manpower audit of contractual employees from time to time. It is a routine thing," said Samar Bhattacharya, secretary of Webel Cooperative, a society run by workers of closed factories of Webel.