Kolkata, May 12: Experienced leader and six-time MLA Tapas Roy will take oath as the acting speaker of the West Bengal Assembly on Tuesday. Governor R.N. Ravi will administer the oath to Roy in his new role.
As acting speaker, Tapas Roy will oversee the oath-taking ceremony of the newly elected 293 MLAs from the recently concluded West Bengal Assembly elections on May 13 and 14.
The acting speaker is a temporary presiding officer appointed for a limited period before the election of the regular speaker of the Lok Sabha or state assembly. They are typically the most senior member of the house and supervise the swearing-in ceremony for new members.
Tapas Roy is the senior-most MLA among the 207 current legislators of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has formed its first government in West Bengal since independence following this assembly election.
Sources within the state unit of the BJP have indicated that Roy may also be a candidate for the position of the party’s speaker in the assembly.
The West Bengal Assembly has a total of 294 seats, but currently, there are only 293 MLAs, as the Election Commission of India (ECI) has ordered a re-poll for the entire Falta assembly constituency in South 24 Parganas due to widespread electoral malpractices on April 29. The re-poll for Falta will take place on May 21, with results to be announced on May 24.
Tapas Roy’s journey as an elected MLA began in 1996 when he was first elected from the Vidyasagar constituency as a Congress candidate before the delimitation. He was re-elected in 2001 from the Bara Bazaar constituency, another pre-delimitation area in South Kolkata. Roy was re-elected from the Baranagar constituency on a Trinamool ticket.
He was nominated as the BJP candidate for the Kolkata (North) Lok Sabha seat in 2024 but lost to four-time Trinamool Congress MP Sudip Bandopadhyay. This year, he contested from the Maniktala assembly constituency in North Kolkata as a BJP candidate and won by defeating Trinamool Congress‘s Shreya Pandey by over 125,000 votes.