The Nepal Trade Union Congress (NTUC) was the first national trade union center in Nepal. It was founded in 1947 and had a membership of 192,000 in 2000. The NTUC was affiliated to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU, later the International Trade Union Confederation), and was politically linked with the Nepali Congress (NCP). On 2 March 2008, the NTUC merged with DECONT (the Democratic Confederation of Nepalese Trade Unions, an organisation which had split from the NTUC in 1997) to become the Nepal Trade Union Congress-Independent (NTUC-I).