Krishnagar, July 22: Around four lakh petitions by ordinary people have been lying unattended in Nadia’s district offices, some of them for decades.

The petitions include requests for pension, jobs on compassionate ground, residential and caste certificates and mutation of property.

The district magistrate had hit the tip of the iceberg two months ago when an 80-year-old retired schoolteacher met him to say he had not got his pension in two decades, not even after a high court order five years ago.

Prasun Lahiry had moved court after running from pillar to post for 15 years after his retirement from Bhanderkhola High School near Krishnagar. In 2003, the high court ordered the government to pay his pension immediately.

Lahiry, who lives in Barasat in neighbouring North 24-Parganas, has been going from one office to the other since then, all in vain.

When district magistrate Onkar Singh Meena called for the file, it was found deep under stacks of paper at the office of the inspector of schools (secondary). “The file had been lying unattended to for 20 years,” Meena said.

Ashu Sutradhar, 53, has been going around in circles trying to get the peon’s job her husband held before he died 16 years ago. She is armed with a high court order, too.

A resident of Gobrapota in Nadia, she has struggled for years to bring up her two sons and a daughter with her monthly pension of Rs 1,500.

While investigating the two cases, Meena said, he came across 120 petitions for road accident compensation, pending for five years or more. “After stumbling on the accident claims, I ordered a thorough investigation in all the departments to look for other petitions. Then the floodgates opened and we were hit by four lakh petitions,” the DM said.

Tens of thousands have not got their pension because their papers were lying in district offices. “Nearly 50,000 people have not got various kinds of pension — widow pen- sion, old-age pension, pension for physically challenged, for example. Like Lahiry, they have suffered because of our inaction,” Meena confessed.

Nearly three lakh cases of land and property mutation have also not been addressed.

About 500 youths were denied jobs in Nadia the past two years because they could not furnish residential certificates. Thousands of applications for SC/ST certificates were also found in the paper stacks.

“In many cases, appointments were cancelled because the candidates could not produce the required certificates. It is shocking,” said Meena.

The district magistrate has held a string of meetings in the past few days and told senior officials to work on a war footing to clear the backlog within a year. “I have told them that this is a very sorry state of affairs and the backlog will have to be cleared within a year. It is because of us that so many people have been suffering,” Meena said.

Almost half the pending mutation applications have been cleared over the past month. “We have also issued caste certificates to about 18,000 people,” Meena said.