EC post-SIR re-registration proceedings will not include West Bengal cases pending before the Appellate Courts

According to an affidavit filed by the EC in the Supreme Court, 22.21 lakh appeals are pending in tribunals in West Bengal. File | Photo credit: PTI

The Election Commission’s (EC) special door-to-door drive to re-enroll any voter who remains behind during the SIR process through Form 6 will not apply to the more than 20 million voters in West Bengal whose cases are pending before the Appellate Tribunals. This could create two parallel re-registration routes, one through the tribunals and one through Form 6 applications to Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), and as the EC mandated Form 6 applicants to be approved within a month or two, tribunal appellants could wait several years.

A senior EC official told The Hindu that while the Booth Level Officers (BLOs) would re-check the ASDD (Absent/Shifted/Dead/Duplicate) list issued after the enumeration phase, those whose cases are before the tribunal, “others as they are already subject to judicial proceedings”.

According to an affidavit filed by the EC in the Supreme Court, 22.21 lakh appeals are pending in tribunals in West Bengal.

The Appellate Tribunals came out of the Supreme Court’s oversight of the SIR. Judicial officers, drawn up from a list sent by the Calcutta High Court on the instructions of the Supreme Court, adjudicated about 60 million “doubtful and pending” cases. On March 10, the Supreme Court ordered that a separate appellate body be set up so that people can challenge the decisions of these officials. On March 21, the EC constituted 19 Appellate Tribunals for West Bengal. The tribunals began functioning around 13 April and on 16 April the Supreme Court ordered that voters whose appeals succeed be added through a supplementary list. This happened just days before parliamentary elections began on April 23, and by then only 136 names had reportedly been cleared.

Earlier, during the enumeration phase, about 31.7 lakh voters (31,68,424) were identified as “unmapped”, meaning they could not be linked to the 2002 electoral roll. Another 1.36 million or so were identified as “logical discrepancy”. Both groups were invited to a hearing after the draft list was published on December 16 last year.

About 60 million cases were still pending when the final list was released on February 28 after hearings cleared up the rest. The Chief Electoral Officer described them as names that were subject to judgment for logical contradictions.

The ASDD list was prepared by the BLO during the enumeration phase and published before the proposal. Its 58,20,898 names were excluded from the draft list on 16 December 2025. Of these, 24.16 million were marked dead, 32.65 million moved or absent and 1.38 million duplicates.

In a letter dated October 1 to the Chief Executives of all States and Union Territories, the EC said that the BLOs will compare the current voter list with the pre-SIR voter list and identify such voters whose names were mentioned in the pre-SIR list but who are not included in the current voter list and prepare a list of such voters. They then have to make a personal visit to ascertain their current status and secure registration through Form 6 if the person is found eligible.

The West Bengal Congress said these voters will be disenfranchised for the second time in a row since the enrollment call was announced just before the October 6 elections in Nandigram and Rejinagar, where over 6,000 and 12,000 appeals remain pending.

In a letter to the EC, WBPCC President Shubhankar Sarkar and party SIR Committee Chairman Prasenjit Bose requested that all 22.21 lakh appellants be temporarily restored to the electoral roll till their appeals are finally decided or that all pending tribunal appeals be converted to Form 6 applications addressed to the concerned EROs.

Published – 02 Oct 2026 21:40 IST