Guwahati: An Assam-Meghalaya cadre IAS officer has been accused of continuing to use a government community hall in Guwahati to store his personal belongings, months after vacating the official flats allotted to him.

Manvendra Pratap Singh, a 2012-batch IAS officer currently serving as Commissioner of the Assam Transport Department, was earlier allotted accommodation at the Forest Colony in Rehabari. According to the allegations, he occupied two flats there simultaneously — living in one and using the other to store excess luggage.

Singh has since been allotted a flat at the IAS Officers’ Colony in Khanapara and vacated both Rehabari flats. But the controversy has not ended there. He is alleged to have continued using the ground-floor community hall at the Forest Colony to store his personal belongings, despite no longer residing on the premises.

Requests went unheeded for over two years

According to the allegations, Singh has been retaining the community hall for personal storage for more than two years now. The Assam Forest department has reportedly written to him on several occasions during this period, asking him to clear his belongings from the hall — but the requests are said to have fallen on deaf ears, with the luggage remaining in place.

This prolonged occupation has left the space unavailable for the shared use of other officers and residents of the colony, who rely on it as a common facility.

An email sent by Northeast Now to Singh seeking his comments on the allegations remained unresponsive. This story will be updated if a response is received.

A question of accountability

The episode raises a straightforward question: can a serving officer continue to occupy public property for personal use — for over two years — after being allotted alternative accommodation elsewhere?

Government housing and shared facilities are public assets, not private extensions of an officer’s residence — and a community hall is not meant to double as personal storage. The concern is sharpened by the officer’s own position: as a senior bureaucrat heading a state department, he is among those responsible for upholding the very rules now in question.

That repeated departmental requests have allegedly gone unanswered for such an extended period points to a wider problem — whether enforcement of basic administrative norms falters when the person involved holds institutional power. It also puts the onus on the Assam government to show that public property is not subject to informal exemptions for senior officers.

Should Singh respond at a later stage, an explanation — including whether he sought or received permission to use the hall for storage, and why the belongings have not been removed despite two years of repeated requests — would help clarify the matter.

More broadly, the episode tests a simple principle: that rules governing government property should apply uniformly, regardless of rank. Whether the Assam government and the state’s IAS fraternity treat this as a minor lapse or a genuine accountability question may say something about how consistently that principle is upheld in practice.