The Bengal forest department has come up with a corrigendum in the notification for recruitment of “bana sahayaks”, saying job applicants can select any of the official languages in the state for evaluation purpose.

On July 30, the department had announced recruitment of 2,000 bana sahayaks (forest assistants) on a contractual basis with a monthly salary of Rs 10,000 each.

The recruitment drive, however, sparked a controversy in north Bengal because it was mentioned that 60 out of 100 marks would be to evaluate a candidate’s reading and writing skills in Bengali.

A number of political parties, community-based organisations and the MP and MLA of Darjeeling, wrote to state forest minister Rajib Banerjee, mentioning that such a clause (ability to read and write in Bengali) would deny the jobs to youths who had not studied at Bengali medium schools.

The issue was flagged by parties like the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (Binay Tamang faction), an ally of the Trinamul Congress, BJP, Greater Cooch Behar Peoples’ Association and the Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad, which all said there should be option for other languages like Hindi, Nepali, Rajbangshi and Santhali.

The forest department on Friday uploaded on its website “Corrigendum to Engagement of Bana Sahayaks”, mentioning that ability of a candidate to read and write in any of the languages recognised by the Language Act of the state would be considered.

“Ability to read Bengali or any officially recognized language of the state as applicable in the district under the West Bengal Official Language Act of 1961 as amended from time to time,” reads the corrigendum.

Sources have said the Language Act of 1961 that was amended in 2018 mentions that languages like Kamtapuri, Rajbangshi, Kurmali, Bengali, Nepali, Urdu, Hindi, Santhali, Oriya and Punjabi can be used for official work and communication in such areas of the state where at least 10 per cent of the people speak in those languages.

Darjeeling BJP MP Raju Bista has welcomed the corrigendum.

“It would provide a huge relief to youths of north Bengal, one of the linguistically diverse areas of the state. I thank the state forest minister for acting on the issue and giving significance to other state languages in the selection process,” said Bista.

A senior officer of the state forest department said: “We believe the issue has been resolved. Thousands of candidates have already applied for the job and we expect some more applications to pour in.”