New ministers remain jobless in UP Cabinet

The Chief Minister is busy with preparations for Lok Sabha polls..

The Uttar Pradesh government is suffering from governance paralysis. It has been more than a month since UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav inducted seven new ministers into his Cabinet, but he has not yet found the time to give them portfolios. As a result, these seven ministers remain both jobless and homeless.

In the first expansion on 18 January, Ministers of state Manoj Pandey and Gayatri Prasad Prajapati were upgraded to Cabinet rank. In the second expansion a week later, ministers of state Shahid Manzoor, Mehbood Ali and Iqbal Mehmood were also upgraded to Cabinet rank, while Yasser Shah was inducted as Minister of state. Shivakant Ojha was also sworn in as Cabinet minister.

Since these ministers have not been allotted portfolios, they have also not been allotted offices and bungalows. Ministers of state who have been elevated to Cabinet rank cannot continue to work in their earlier ministries, because there cannot be two Cabinet ministers in a single ministry.

“As of now, you can say we are unemployed, because we have nowhere to go to work and we do not even know what our work is,” said one of the unemployed ministers.

It is noteworthy that Raghuraj Pratap Singh, alias Raja Bhaiyya, was brought back into the Cabinet in October, and was assigned the Food and Civil Supplies Ministry. However, he was only allotted a room in Vidhan Bhawan this week, and had been working from his home for the past four months.

A senior official in the CM’s secretariat said that portfolio distribution was complicated as it needed the consent of senior party leaders and the senior ministers.

The CM, apparently, is busy wrapping up work ahead of the Lok Sabha elections and cannot squeeze in time for his jobless ministers.