Mumbai, April 28
Ministers in the Sushil Kumar Shinde government in Maharashtra have offered to resign from their posts in order to enable the Chief Minister to reduce the size of the Cabinet.
Mr Shinde told reporters after the weekly Cabinet meeting that Congress ministers offered to quit so as to give him a free hand to constitute a smaller Cabinet under new constitutional provisions.
As per a recent constitutional amendment to eliminate jumbo Cabinets, the size of the ministry has to be reduced to 15 per cent of the total strength of the Legislative Assembly’s Lower House.
Consequently, Mr Shinde will have to drop 26 ministers from his team of 69 ministers since the strength of the Lower House is 288.
The Maharashtra Chief Minister is expected to take up the matter with the Congress high command before constituting a new House.
While the Congress ministers from the Shinde government will submit their resignations to the Chief Minister, the NCP ministers will do so to party President Sharad Pawar. “Our ministers will submit their resignations to Mr Sharad Pawar,” Maharashtra’s Minister for Home R.R. Patil told reporters after Mr Shinde’s briefing.
As per the seat-sharing formula in Maharashtra, the Congress and the NCP have 29 berths each in the Cabinet while the smaller parties and Independent legislators account for the rest.
The jumbo ministry has been an embarrassment for the Maharashtra Government. The outgo from the state’s exchequer only on salaries and allowances for the ministers and their staff amounts to Rs 35 crore every month, according to sources.
Till recently, there were not even enough rooms to accommodate the ministers at Mantralaya, the state secretariat.
While some functioned from home, others simply grabbed tiny cabins belonging to junior officers at the secretariat.
