Kolkata, May 9 Subrata Gupta, a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, whose role as the Election Commission of India (ECI)-appointed special poll observer for the recently concluded West Bengal Assembly polls received praise from all quarters, on Saturday was appointed as the advisor to the new and ninth Chief Minister of West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari.
On May 7, the ECI relieved Gupta as well as the special police observer from their respective poll duties.
On Saturday, soon after Suvendu Adhikari took oath as the Chief Minister of West Bengal, a notification was issued by the state government announcing Gupta's appointment as an advisor to Adhikari.
Subrata Gupta, a retired IAS officer of West Bengal cadre of 1990 batch, a technocrat and an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, as the special poll observer was credited with successfully implementing ECI's programme of making the polling process transparent and peaceful by proper use of technology and application of artificial intelligence (AI).
During the pre-election special intensive revision (SIR) stage, this extensive use of technology and AI applications helped the ECI to identify the illegal voters and successfully weed out the fake ones.
Again, during the polling phases, this same technological application and AI helped the Commission to eliminate poll-related irregularities and misappropriations.
Former Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supermo Mamata Banerjee accused Gupta of being the main architect in implementing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s agenda to delete names of minority voters selectively from the voters' list.
However, during the entire SIR stage first and then during the election phase, Gupta had been under constant attack from the Trinamool Congress as well as Mamata Banerjee.
On Saturday, the West Bengal government had announced the appointment of Subrata Bala, an IAS officer of 2017 batch of West Bengal as the Principal Secretary to Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. His earlier assignment was as the Additional District Magistrate of South 24 Parganas district.
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