SHILLONG, March 18: The MeECL employees have slammed the Chairman-Cum-Managing Director, Arunkumar Kembhavi, for creating another controversy by allegedly appointing Manish Gupta from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh as his advisor, albeit on a pro bono basis.
Terming the appointment as unprecedented, the employees said there are technical directors in all the three utilities – generation, transmission and distribution – of MeECL.
“There is also the Director of Finance and the Director of Corporate Affairs who will tender advice to the Corporation. There is an element of doubt and suspicious that a person from far away Uttar Pradesh would like to render his services to an organisation in Meghalaya without any remuneration or salary. There must have been a hidden agenda behind the appointment,” the employees said.
Stating that MeECL is a government undertaking and not an NGO, the employees informed that the CMD appointed Gupta within a day of receipt of his application and without any advertisement or notification.
“Even the Chief Secretary, who is the top bureaucrat in the state, does not need a personal advisor and functions effectively with the aid and advice of his officers,” the employees pointed out.
The employees also disclosed that there were two more appointments made in two newly-created posts – Assistant (Techno-Legal) and Assistant (Finance-Commercial) – on contractual basis with a consolidated remuneration of Rs 85,000 per month and the criteria for these posts were tailored to fit the two candidates appointed from outside the state.
According to the employees, Arkajyoti Bhattacharjee from Kolkata was appointed as Techno-Legal assistant while Sunny Kumar Singh from Bihar was appointed as Finance-Commercial assistant.
All the three appointments were made last month when citizens of the state were subjected to seven hours of load-shedding due to non-payment of dues to NTPC.
