Sudip Roy Barman

Sudip Roy Barman was born on February 4th, 1966, in Agartala, Tripura. His father, Samir Ranjan Barman, was a senior politician and Chief Minister of Tripura for a period of time, and his mother was Maya Roy Barman. After going through various academic rituals, he finally came out with a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Calcutta University and an L. L. B. from Tripura University.

He first stepped into politics through the Indian National Congress and, in a short time, ascended to the top through the ranks of the party’s student and youth organisations, such as the Tripura Youth Congress, where he acted as General Secretary and Vice President in the early 90s.

Barman entered the fray of the assembly election for the first time in 1993 from Agartala against the CPI(M) leader Nripen Chakraborty and just missed out on winning by a slight margin, but in 1998 he was elected and then continued to win the Agartala assembly constituency in all elections up to 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2022, and thus he became one of the dominant and most successful legislators in the state.

He was a long-serving politician who held a number of important positions at the time of the Congress party as he was the president of the Tripura Pradesh Congress Committee and Leader of the Opposition in the Tripura Assembly. He migrated to the All India Trinamool Congress in 2016 along with other MLAs, later that year moving to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with whom he won the 2018 election. He was made a minister in the Tripura cabinet (2018–2019), and managed various important portfolios including Health & Family Welfare, Public Works, Industries & Commerce, and Science & Technology & Environment before being ousted from the cabinet in 2019.

Barman, in February 2022, quit the BJP, resigned as MLA, rejoined the Indian National Congress, and later that year won the Agartala by-election, thus securing his hold on the seat.

Sudip Roy Barman, as of 2025, still holds and maintains his position as Agartala’s MLA and keeps being the leader of the Congress party in Tripura, with a reputation for being a resilient electoral candidate.