Nirupam Sen

Calcutta, Feb. 19: The CPM has failed to find a new power minister after Mrinal Banerjee’s death earlier this month and decided to increase the responsibilities of industries and commerce minister Nirupam Sen.

Sen, himself not well and in charge of several other departments like industrial reconstruction, public undertakings and planning, will also take care of power and non-conventional energy now, a government notification said today.

The decision is being seen as a sign of the power equations within the government and the CPM. Insiders said the initial plan was to divide the responsibilities that Banerjee had shouldered between Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Sen, the chief minister’s de facto No. Two, as both were politburo members.

Bhattacharjee had been overseeing a central rural electrification project named after Rajv Gandhi, the intervention coming after MLAs of the CPM and its Left Front allies expressed unhappiness with the Banerjee-led department’s failure to meet targets for power connections in their areas. With the Assembly polls a year away, the rural dissatisfaction over the failure had worried the CPM and its allies, already smarting from a string of poll setbacks.

“Buddhada will continue to supervise rural electrification in view of the importance of the project. Nirupamda will take care of the power generating and distributing companies as he was monitoring them after Mrinalda fell ill,’’ a CPM state secretariat member had said.

However, today’s government notification does not mention any division of responsibilities. Sections of the government and the party insisted that Bhattacharjee would still supervise the rural power project. “It is not possible to formally divide the responsibilities of the department between the two,’’ said a party veteran.

But others felt that Sen had been given Banerjee’s job to ensure the “Burdwan lobby” within the CPM continued to wield control. Banerjee was from the district, as is Sen.