Karwar: Outgoing DC Ujjwal Kumar Ghosh, who has been transferred as the chief executive officer of the Centre for e-Governance, was given a warm farewell at the DC’s office on Saturday.

The employees of revenue and other departments felicitated Ghosh.

Ghosh told reporters that his tenure as DC was satisfactory. He thanked the people for their support. During his tenure, Ghosh was popular among people for his style of work. When there was rumors about his transfer about a year ago, people staged a protest.

Immediately after taking charge as the DC, he accorded top priority to speed up development works across the district. He took action against some officials who failed to deliver their duties properly. He had conducted raids during night hours to prevent smuggling of Goan liquor, sand and other minerals.

However, his work style irritated most of the MLAs of the district, but he enjoyed the support of people. The MLAs accused him of ignoring them while taking up development works and criticized him for not sanctioning land rights to the forest-dwellers under the Forest Rights Act. But, Ghosh had clarified that he would grant forest rights only to genuine forest-dwellers. Some MLAs were even accused of conspiring to get him transferred from the district. Former Assembly speaker Kagodu Thimmappa had urged the government to get the DC transferred after some MLAs allegedly prevailed upon him to do so.

A former Google employee, Ghosh had given importance to e-governance. He started a WhatsApp grievances redressal unit to address the problems of people and it received good response. ZP CEO Ramprasath Manohar, Additional DC H Prasanna and other senior officials were present.