Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti

Mamata Banerjee may have promised Mukesh Ambani everything needed for a smooth roll-out of Reliance’s 4G services in Bengal, but the appointment of the person tipped to spearhead the project is proving a problem.

Police sources said Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti, a former city police commissioner, had been selected to head the project but is yet to be appointed.

Chakrabarti retired from government service in May this year but Ambani’s Reliance Jio hasn’t formalised the appointment apparently because of a clause in the service rules of IPS officers.

The rule states that a retired IPS officer must complete a “cooling off” period — a year from the day of retirement — before he or she can join a private company. “If a retired officer wishes to join a company before the cooling off period ends, he/she must write and seek an approval from the Union home ministry. The ministry may waive the condition for the particular officer if it deems this appropriate,” an IPS officer said.

The officer seeking permission for immediate post-retirement employment needs to route the application through the state government for which he or she had worked.

Since Chakrabarti was an officer of the West Bengal cadre, his application has to be routed through the state.

Speculation is rife about Chakrabarti’s equation with the powers that be becoming a hurdle. He had allegedly dragged Mamata by her hair in 1992 when she, then a Congress MP, paraded a deaf and mute rape victim from Nadia in front of chief minister Jyoti Basu’s chamber at Writers’.

Chakrabarti then headed the detective department.

Sources in the state police said the former commissioner had informed Mamata about his intention to take up the Reliance Jio assignment two months before his retirement.

An official spokesperson for Reliance Jio declined to comment. Other sources said Chakrabarti hadn’t joined the company.