Small mistakes in names like Kumar shortened to Kr or Ray as Roy, Mallick as Mallik have caused immense harassment as many still run to the pillar to find documents to prove that these people are the same. File | Photo credit: DEBASISH BHADURI
Three months into the Special Intensive Review (SIR) process in West Bengal, queues are still long before hearings as thousands of voters await answers to what the Election Commission (EC) calls “logical inconsistencies” in the electoral roll.
Since the draft voter list is to be published on February 14, the hearing must be completed by February 7 as per the set deadlines. Officials say this has increased pressure at hearing centers where hundreds of voters are summoned each day. Voters and election officials alike are racing against time amid widespread confusion over surname variations, clerical errors and automatically generated alerts.
Common surnames
Common Bengali surnames such as Bandhopadhyay, Chattopadhyay and Gangopadhyay were anglicized over time to Banerjee, Chatterjee and Ganguly. However, lakhs received hearing notices for these. The issue was recently raised by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in the Supreme Court.
“My grandfather and father used the surname Chattopadhyay because places like Calcutta University and government schools in Bengal didn’t recognize ‘Chatterjee’ as a surname for the longest time. But we always used it. Still, both my sister and I got notices,” said a voter from south Kolkata, who did not want to be named. Lakhs like her face the same problem.
Small mistakes in names like Kumar shortened to Kr or Ray as Roy, Mallick as Mallik have caused immense harassment as many still run to the pillar to find documents to prove that these people are the same.
“We don’t want to trouble anyone. We also know that Kr and Kumar are the same and Chattopadhyay and Chatterjee are the same. But the hearing notices were generated by the system. Once someone gets the notice, they have to appear for the hearing,” a senior officer involved in the hearing process told The Hindu.
Age differences
In some cases, age differences in families also raised warning signs. Thirty-year-old Sriparna Ghosh was questioned because her age difference with her father was 54 years.
Standing outside the Sree Jain Swetamber Terapanthi Vidalaya in north Kolkata, M. Bhatti said all their siblings have been summoned for the hearing.
“We have all the necessary documents. We will show what they will need. Our father had six children,” added Mr Bhatti.
The issue was raised by both the Congress and the Trinamool Congress. West Bengal Congress president Subhankar Sarkar called the threshold set by the EC “arbitrary” and pointed out that the number of voters with six or more voters associated with them as children is 2,06,056, while if the threshold is raised to 10, it will be only 8,682.
Syed Shahab Alam, a 58-year-old man who spent his entire life in civil defense and serving the nation, came out of the hearing center at Sree Jain Swetamber Terapanthi Vidalaya and waited for his daughter to appear. He submitted 14 documents to prove that the father’s incorrect name on his daughter’s birth certificate was a clerical error and not a bogus voter issue.
“They wrote my name as Mohammad Shahab Alam in my daughter’s birth certificate. When a small child is born, people are more concerned about the welfare of the child and the mother. Who cared about checking the names,” Mr Alam said. However, since he served as a booth-level officer till 2024, he was familiar with the election process and therefore kept the records intact.
After the completion of the first phase of SIR, about 58 lakh names were cleared in West Bengal, taking the number of voters in the state to 7.08 lakh from 7.66 lakh. About 1.36 million such notices of logical inconsistencies have been issued. The Supreme Court ordered that the list of logical irregularities be made public, but the lists still remain inaccessible and available only to election officials.
Published – 06 Feb 2026 19:51 IST
