2026-09-26·Post

How to Run a Durga Puja Committee: Roles, Money and Timeline

A committee is a job description, not a title

In a small Kolkata puja, the committee is five or six people who between them do a hundred small things between June and October: booking a carpenter, printing a chiti, arguing about the theme, chasing an electrician, standing on a road at 2 am on Dashami. The quality of the puja is decided almost entirely by whether those hundred things get done by somebody specific.

So the first question is not who is president. It is: does every task on this list have a name attached to it? Committees that answer yes produce better pandals with smaller budgets. Committees that answer no produce the same pandal every year, and argue about it harder every year.

The structure that works

President / convenor. Decides, and is accountable. Should be the person who can settle an argument in ten minutes, not the most senior person in the room.
Secretary. Owns the calendar, the minutes and the paperwork. In practice this is the person who makes the puja work, and it should be a working role, not an honorary one.
Treasurer. Holds the money, the cash book and the collection book. Should not also be the person doing the collection, and should never be the only signer.
Five to nine general members. Not more. A committee of twenty makes decisions slowly and then ignores them.
One auditor, not from the treasurer’s family. Nominated before the season starts, not appointed in October when the accounts are ready.
One point of contact for the street. The person neighbours call about the pandal. One name, one number.

A useful test: could a neighbour ask who to call, and get one answer? If the committee has five people who all feel equally responsible, it has no secretary.

The first meeting: the agenda that actually matters

Most committees hold a general meeting that discusses who will cook the bhog and then disperse. The one meeting that matters has these six items, in this order.

Last year’s accounts, presented and adopted. A committee that has not settled last year’s account has no moral standing to ask for this year’s chanda. Ten minutes, receipt by receipt, and it gets adopted or it does not.
Roles assigned by name. Not roles discussed. Names written in the minutes.
Broad budget range agreed. A range, not a number. The number comes in August.
Theme shortlist, three options maximum. With a rough cost attached to each.
Dates fixed. Pandal erection start, inauguration, pandal-down date, immersion date, and the date of the final general meeting.
Chiti rate decided, or a date fixed to decide it. Leaving this open is how committees end up arguing about money in the last week.

Thirty minutes, one hour at most. Anything longer than that and the useful decisions get lost.

Five things to put in writing

None of these need a lawyer. They need to exist as a single sheet each, signed, and kept.

Role list. What each of the five or six roles is expected to do, in the committee’s own words.
Budget. Line-item, approved by the general meeting, with a date. The single most useful document a committee produces.
Collection record. The pre-numbered chiti books, and the daily tally sheet that goes with them.
Cash book. Separate from the collection book, as two different things entirely.
Minutes. One page per meeting: date, who attended, what was decided, who is doing it by when. This is the handover mechanism for next year.

Without minutes, a committee restarts from zero every year. The same theme is debated, the same accounts are questioned, the same two people do everything.

Money: four rules that prevent most disputes

Two signatures on every payment, always. No single person both spends and records. This one rule prevents the majority of committee trouble.
Deposited within 24 hours. Collected cash goes into the account the same night. Cash sitting in a house overnight is how collection disputes start.
A statement on the notice board every week. Collected, spent, balance. Three lines, dated, public. It costs nothing and it neutralises most suspicion.
An independent audit before the final meeting. Two people who are not the treasurer or their family verify the cash book against receipts.

The full picture of the money side is in our guides to what a Kolkata puja committee actually costs and collecting chanda without wrecking the neighbourhood.

Who does what: a role-by-role calendar

This is the whole year in one table of who should be working on what.

June – July: decide and book

Secretary: runs the first meeting, sets the calendar, books the meeting dates for the whole season in advance.
President: approaches potential sponsors, talks to artisans about availability, decides the theme against the budget.
Treasurer: calculates the budget gap, decides the chita rate, opens the collection books.
Members: form the collection teams and assign streets.

August: write it down

Committee: approves the line-item budget. This is the meeting where the pandal’s size is decided.
President and secretary: book the artisan and the idol maker. Slots fill weeks ahead; this is the single most time-critical task of the season.
Treasurer: distributes chiti books to collectors, and pre-numbers them.

September: build and collect

Everyone: collection on a fixed evening slot, same streets, daily tally. The busiest month for every role.
President and one member: pandal site, permits, pandal-erection start.
Secretary: weekly statement on the notice board; pandal fabrication supervised on site by someone named.
Member for pandal: one person who owns fabrication, including the decision to stop adding things.

October: run it, then close it

Full committee: on the ground every evening during the puja days. A committee that is absent during its own puja is visible to the entire street.
Treasurer plus a second signer: the donation box counted every night, in front of two people, with a written total.
President: police liaison, road clearance, the immersion crane and manpower.
Secretary: accounts closed and audited, final general meeting called, brochure with the final account printed.

After immersion: the part that gets skipped

Surplus bamboo, fittings and lights sold or stored, and the proceeds entered in the cash book.
Final accounts adopted by the general meeting and printed in the brochure.
One written note for next year: what worked, what did not, which artisan to book earlier, which street was hard to collect on.
The chiti books archived.

That last note is the whole difference between a committee and an annual committee. Ours is on the day-by-day plan page, dated against the 2026 dates.

Running the meetings

Three meetings is enough: one to decide (July), one to approve the budget (August), one to close the accounts (after immersion). More meetings produce talk, not decisions.
Seven days’ notice for the budget meeting, with the budget document circulated in advance. Approving a budget you have not read is not a decision.
Ten-minute reading of last meeting’s minutes at the start of every one, checking off what was actually done. This single habit is what makes a committee accountable to itself.
Decisions in the minutes, with the name. “The pandal will be 40 feet” is not a decision. “Pandal to be 40 feet, approved, S. Dasgupta to inform the carpenter” is.

How most committees actually fail

Everything decided in the last ten days. By then the artisan is booked, the rate is fixed by whoever is free, and the pandal is whatever the carpenter could do.
One person does eighty percent of the work. It works, for that year. It does not work the year they are ill, or move away, or simply tired.
No accounts, because the accounts are uncomfortable. Which guarantees the next year’s collection is harder than this one’s.
No successor. The committee that starts from scratch each year never improves, because nothing is carried forward.
The committee is a social club. If the only thing that gets decided is the refreshment for the general meeting, the street notices within a year.

What good actually looks like

A well-run committee is not one with the biggest pandal. It is one where, a month after Dashami, nobody on the street is annoyed.

The account is public and balanced, and the chanda is on the same street next year.
The bhog was good, the pandal was finished, and the immersion was safe.
Nobody had to be chased for money twice in a way they resented.
The committee had the same arguments it has every year, and settled them in ten minutes.
Next year’s committee starts from notes instead of from nothing.

That is the entire standard. Everything else is decoration — which, to be fair to the Kumartuli artisans, is extremely good decoration.

For the different flavours of community puja, see our guides to sarbojanin barowari puja and housing society puja.

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