Sack the ministers who took decision to bring in contractual recruitment, NCP’s Supriya Sule tells BJP

PTI, Oct 21, 2023, 7:48 PM IST

Nationalist Congress Party working president Supriya Sule on Saturday said the ministers responsible for taking the decision on contractual recruitment must be sacked.

Talking to reporters, the Baramati MP said the Bharatiya Janata Party holding protests on the issue of recruitment on contract basis was hilarious, adding that deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis must tell his workers that their party is in power.

The BJP held protests in several parts of the state during the day asking the Maha Vikas Aghadi and previous Congress-led dispensations as well as its leaders like Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar to apologise for bringing in contract recruitment into the process of government hiring.

The decision to go in for contractual recruitment was not taken during the Congress-NCP rule and the BJP must find out when it started, Sule said.

The protests are targeted at (NCP supremo) Sharad Pawar, who was not chief minister in the period between 2011 and 2021, she pointed out.

During this period (Chief Minister) Eknath Shinde, (Deputy CM) Ajit Pawar, Dilip Walse Patil, Chhagan Bhujbal, Uday Samant, Dhananjay Munde, Shamburaj Desai, Gulabrao Patil, Dada Bhuse, Hasan Mushrif were ministers, and they are ministers at present as well, Sule said.

”Sack the minister who signed on the government resolution (on contractual recruitment),” Sule demanded.

Fadnavis on Friday announced scrapping of a government order meant for recruiting staff on a contract basis by nine private agencies, and said it was the previous Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) dispensation which had taken a decision to hire workforce on short-term basis.

Addressing a press conference, Fadnavis had said the first recruitment on a contractual basis was done in 2003 when the Congress-NCP government was in power in Maharashtra.

He said contractual staff was hired for the first time in the education department under the Sushilkumar Shinde-led government.

”The Uddhav Thackeray government accepted it (contractual hiring) as a policy. All processes were done during the tenure of the Thackeray government (November 2018-June 2022),” he said.

”They (the MVA government) have committed a sin and we are being blamed for it,” Fadnavis had said at the press conference on Friday.