Kolkata, Mar 21 (IANS): The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) directive on Thursday to remove four District Magistrates (DMs) in West Bengal could have been avoided, had the state government chosen not to ignore the guidelines for entrusting officers with poll duties.

According to sources in the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) office, even before the election dates were announced top officials of the commission during their visit to the state clearly said that only DMs coming from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) cadres can be given election related duties.

It had stressed that under no circumstance should those promoted as DMs from the state civil service cadre be used for poll duties.

None of the transferred DMs are IAS-cadre officers and all of them belong to the West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) category.

Sources said either this guideline remained unnoticed by the state administration or the latter chose to ignore it.

However, sources added, the matter did not remain unnoticed by the ECI, which is evident from Thursday's directive on the transfers of DMs of East Midnapore, East Burdwan, Jhargram and Birbhum.

“Under the directive, all respective state governments have been instructed to promptly transfer non-encadred officers from their current roles as DM and SP/SSP, with immediate effect, and submit a compliance report to the Commission,” the concluding lines of the directive from the ECI read.

A senior bureaucrat, who retired a few years ago as Additional Chief Secretary, said on condition of anonymity that in the last five to six years there had been a growing tendency in the state to appoint “non-encadred” category officers for “encadred” posts.

“In fact there are grievances among a section within the IAS Association over this tendency. While such issues are ignored during normal times, they cannot remain unnoticed by the ECI before the elections. In a sense the transfers of these four DMs were inevitable,” the retired bureaucrat said.