The inauguration of a Chief Minister’s Secretariat in Dibrugarh, the first of its kind in Assam, on Friday, has also set off a new chapter in the history of administration and governance in the state in the past two centuries or so. It is a historic move through which the BJP-led government headed by Himanta Biswa Sarma has sought to bring upper Assam closer to Dispur. As has been reported, this, in effect, is decentralizing governance in the true sense of the term in Dibrugarh and its nine surrounding districts. While the Chief Minister has announced that people of the nine eastern districts of the state would no longer be required to go to Dispur for most kinds of government work, what is more significant is that the Chief Minister himself will officiate from his Dibrugarh office four days every month. The two CMOs, one at Dispur and the other at Dibrugarh, will also be connected digitally in order to make governance and decision-making faster. There was a time when people from all over the region had to travel all the way to Shillong for any kind of government work like decision-making, appointments, promotion, and work related to the Accountant General. After the creation of Meghalaya and the shifting of the capital temporarily to Dispur in 1974, people have been travelling to Guwahati. Now, the new CM’s Secretariat in Dibrugarh will enhance administrative connectivity with nearly 7.9 million people across 21,264 square km in the upper Assam districts of Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, Lakhimpur, Dhemaji, Sivasagar, Charaideo, Majuli, Jorhat, and Golaghat. In the Chief Minister’s own words, the Secretariat in Dibrugarh is not just a building; it illustrates his government’s sustained efforts to bring governance closer to the people. For decades, due to legacy issues, there has been an opinion that people living away from the state capital have missed out on developmental opportunities. For the last three years, the BJP-led government in Assam has focused on establishing districts as the fulcrum of governance. With the upgrade of the Deputy Commissioners to District Commissioners, the present government has empowered district and sub-district machinery to take most of the decisions. Inaugurating the Dibrugarh Secretariat, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has promised that over the coming months, the people in the nine upper Assam districts will see faster decision-making and quicker implementation of projects due to these efforts. Dibrugarh, which has also got the second Municipal Corporation in the state after Guwahati, is a town that is inching towards 200 years of its existence. It was a major centre of governance during the early British period, and it was close to Dibrugarh that tea had been “discovered” about 200 years ago, which has, over the decades, also made the town the tea capital of Assam. It was from Dibrugarh that the first railway train in the entire Northeast had first moved, while Dibrugarh had also attained a special place in the Second World War.