Kolkata, June 2:
West Bengal Governor RN Ravi on Monday administered oath to 35 MLAs as ministers in the state’s first BJP-helmed cabinet, taking the total strength of Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s council of ministers to 41.
While 13 BJP MLAs were sworn in as cabinet ministers, three were administered oath as ministers of state (Independent Charge) and 19 others were inducted in the council as ministers of state
The ceremony took place at the Lok Bhavan here in the presence of Adhikari, the existing ministers of his cabinet and senior bureaucrats of the state administration.
Newly-elected BJP MLAs Swapan Dasgupta, Shankar Ghosh, Arjun Singh, Tapas Roy, Saradwat Mukherjee and Jagannath Chattopadhyay were among those who took oath as cabinet ministers.
Party MLAs Dudh Kumar Mondal, Deepak Burman, Manoj Oraon and Gouri Shankar Ghosh were also sworn in as cabinet ministers.
BJP legislators Rajesh Mahata, Indranil Khan and Malati Rava Roy were sworn in as ministers of state (Independent Charge) in the Suvendu Adhikari government.
Among the ministers of state who were administered the oath were Joyel Murmu, Ashok Dinda, Anandamoy Burman, Kaushik Chowdhury, Gargi Das Ghosh, Bhaskar Bhattacharya, Dibakar Gharami and Sumana Sarkar.
BJP MLAs Santanu Pramanik, Purnima Chakraborty and Umesh Rai were also sworn in as ministers of state.
The current strength of ministers is now 41, three short of the maximum count that a government can have in the 294-member assembly.
The oath-taking ceremony was held three weeks after Adhikari was sworn in as the chief minister on May 9 in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the BJP’s central leadership and CMs of NDA-ruled states.
Along with Adhikari, BJP legislators Dilip Ghosh, Agnimitra Paul, Nisith Pramanik, Ashok Kirtania and Kshudiram Tudu also took oath as ministers on that day.