Congress leader Prasenjit Bose has moved the Supreme Court seeking directions to the Election Commission of India (ECI) for greater transparency in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal, particularly with respect to additions and deletions of voters’ names.
The petition sought constituency-wise disclosure of data related to Form 6 applications for inclusion of names in the electoral rolls and Form 7 applications for deletion, including details of applications received, admitted, and rejected during the claims and objections stage of the SIR exercise. It further sought publication of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) governing appeals before SIR Appellate Tribunals, along with simplified appeal guidelines in Bengali, Hindi and English to ensure accessibility for electors.
According to the plea, although over 58 lakh electors were excluded during the enumeration phase of the SIR process, the Election Commission has not disclosed granular, constituency-level data on applications filed for inclusion or removal of names. It further stated that by January 2026, more than 9.64 lakh inclusion applications and 99,118 deletion applications had been submitted, while only 1.82 lakh additions ultimately found place in the final electoral rolls published on February 28, 2026.
The petition contended that the absence of constituency-wise disclosure and the non-publication of prescribed formats under the Election Commission’s Electoral Rolls Manual, 2024, raised serious concerns regarding procedural transparency, administrative accountability, and effective public scrutiny of the electoral roll revision mechanism.
It also challenged the method adopted for scrutinising over 60 lakh entries flagged for what the authorities described as logical discrepancies, including inconsistencies such as age mismatches between parents and children, multiple linkage entries, and name variations. The petitioner argued that such criteria did not find explicit mention in SIR notifications and were not traceable to any statutory provision under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, thereby raising questions on the legal basis of the verification framework.
Bose further submitted that despite the Supreme Court directions for the constitution of 19 appellate tribunals to adjudicate challenges relating to inclusion and deletion of voters’ names, the appellate mechanism suffered from procedural opacity.
Noting that the SOP framed on April 7 by a committee comprising former judges of the Calcutta High Court was yet to be placed in the public domain, the plea contended that there was no accessible framework governing the filing of appeals, issuance of notices, submission of evidence, conduct of hearings, or timelines for disposal of such disputes.
The petition also referred to a West Bengal government notification under the Annapurna Yojana welfare scheme, which stipulated that persons removed from electoral rolls would cease to be beneficiaries unless they had preferred appeals before the SIR tribunals. It argued that wrongful deletion from electoral rolls may therefore have cascading civil consequences beyond the loss of voting rights, including deprivation of social welfare entitlements.
On March 10, 2026, the Supreme Court, while reviewing the SIR process in West Bengal, had directed the creation of appellate tribunals headed by former High Court judges and mandated procedural safeguards to protect affected electors. Later on May 27, the Court observed that structural safeguards introduced during the revision process ensured procedural fairness and prevented arbitrary exclusion of eligible voters.
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