Organisational changes in Trinamool Congress

Trinamool Chairperson Mamata Banerjee presided over a meeting of Presidents of various district committees, heads of frontal organisations and senior leaders at her Kalighat office today.

Keeping in mind the growing national importance of the party several organisational changes were made in the meeting.

Party Secretary General Partha Chatterjee addressed the press after the meeting to make the following announcements:

  • Trinamool has appointed Subrata Bakshi as All India General Secretary.
  • Derek O’Brien, Firhad Hakim and Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar have been elevated to a new body which will function as the National Secretariat of the party.
  • Subrata Mukherjee has been given the charge of Tripura. Suvendu Adhikari will oversee organisational activities in Assam. Derek O’Brien will oversee the party’s organisation in North Eastern states and Kerala.
  • Dinesh Trivedi has been appointed as one of the new Vice Presidents of the party.
  • Derek O’Brien and Kalyan Banerjee will keep in touch with like-minded parties and oversee functions in Parliament.
  • Municipal elections were discussed today. We have formed committees for the same.
  • We started the membership drive on January 1, 2015. Scrutiny committees will operate at district and State level.
  • There will be no membership fees for family of martyrs. People can become primary members of the party by paying a fee of Re 1.
  • One can also become a Associate or active member of the party by paying Rs 50000, which will be renewable every 5 years.
  • All applications for membership will be submitted to District Scrutiny Committees, who in turn will forward them to State Scrutiny Committee for final approval.
  • District Committees have been asked to prepare list of candidates for upcoming municipal polls, which will be submitted to State Committee. Mamata Banerjee will give final approval for the the candidate list.

Toilets for all – Bengal’s Nadia district shortlisted for UN award

West Bengal’s Nadia district is poised to complete building toilets for all its residents by next March, under a programme which has been shortlisted for the United Nations global award for public service.

95 per cent of the people had already stopped defecating in the open and by this March they would achieve a 100 per cent open defecation-free status.

The scheme “Sobar Souchagar”, meaning toilets for all, was launched in 2013 with a time span of five years to achieve the target of toilets for all.

For the “Sobar Souchagar” programme, no additional funds were allocated by the state government, but available funds from government schemes like ‘National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan’ (NBA) and National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) were pooled together to achieve the feat in less than two years.

For constructing toilets, labour cost was borne under NREGA while raw materials for building toilets came from NBA.

The scheme has attracted the notice of the United Nations and has been shortlisted for the UN global award for public service.

The state head of the UNICEF, praised the programme, saying Nadia is fast becoming a model for all other states in India. “We are planning to organise a national level meeting of district magistrates from all over India to showcase this as a model project. This will inspire them in achieving the target of full sanitation,” he said.