Shafaqna India: The sheer scale of West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is coming into sharper focus, with around 60 lakh claims and objections examined, over seven lakh appeals being filed, and political parties scrambling to help anxious voters navigate a process that is increasingly testing the capacity of tribunals, courts and administrative machinery.Political analysis reports
The Congress has begun setting up help desks across the state to assist people seeking to challenge exclusions, signalling both the intensity of the dispute and the complexity of the process confronting voters unfamiliar with legal procedures.
Congress leader Ashutosh Chatterjee said a help desk has been opened in Kolkata’s Rashbehari Avenue area, with more centres planned to help people file appeals online, assemble documents and understand whether their names can be restored before upcoming polling phases.
“It’s a good start, but we need door-to-door camps,” Chatterjee said, pointing out that daily wage earners, rural women and other marginalised groups may struggle with paperwork, travel and formal requirements involved in filing appeals.
New appellate tribunals, set up in 10 districts including Salt Lake’s high-powered bench following Supreme Court directions last month, are intended to provide voters with a faster mechanism to challenge deletions from electoral rolls. Party workers say the help desks are expected to function as a bridge for voters unable to easily travel or interpret legal processes on their own.Political campaign updates
The matter again came up in the Supreme Court on Monday, 6 April, where the bench directed that names of verified voters be included in the supplementary list “by tonight”, even as it stressed that the appellate process should not be reduced to a mere procedural formality. Justice Joymalya Bagchi noted that the “peculiar circumstances” and “logical discrepancy” surrounding the revision exercise in West Bengal warranted careful scrutiny of objections.
“Those who have cleared would be in the supplementary list. The others can file an appeal in the appellate tribunal, and we do not want to compress the appeal hearing. The hearing should be held in full in the appellate tribunals,” Justice Bagchi observed.
Senior advocate Shyam Divan submitted before the court that roughly 55 per cent of cases involved exclusion from voter rolls — a proportion he described as unusually high — while also noting that around seven lakh appeals are now being filed. He pointed to long queues forming outside tribunal offices, indicating the volume of applicants attempting to challenge their exclusion.
The Election Commission informed the court that approximately 26,000 objections from the first polling phase were pending before tribunals earlier in the day, with 20,000 to 25,000 objections pending in the second phase. “Appeals are trickling in. Those filed online are getting acknowledgements/receipts. I will check physically,” said senior advocate D.S. Naidu, appearing for the poll panel.
Hooghly, West Bengal: On SIR, Furfura Sharif Pirzada, Toha Siddiqui says, “The effect of SIR will be big enough, I have 6 voters in my home, 1 person’s name has been deleted, and I will never allow the other 5 person’s to vote. If we have to die all our family members will die,⦠pic.twitter.com/8gUUPrE9jv
— IANS (@ians_india) March 24, 2026
At the same time, the Calcutta High Court chief justice told the Supreme Court that by 12.04 pm on 6 April, more than 59.15 lakh of over 60 lakh objections had already been decided by judicial officers as part of the SIR exercise, underscoring the unprecedented scale of scrutiny underway.
The Supreme Court also asked the chief justice of the Calcutta High Court to constitute a three-member panel of former senior judges to frame uniform procedures for all 19 appellate tribunals, suggesting that institutional mechanisms governing appeals are still being standardised even as thousands of fresh cases continue to arrive.
Solicitor-general Tushar Mehta argued that new documents should not be introduced at the appellate stage, but Justice Bagchi reiterated that all relevant records must be made available before tribunals so that appellants can present their case effectively. Advocate Divan questioned how supplementary lists could be frozen before appeals were heard, while senior advocate Kapil Sibal sought interim relief for excluded voters who had already been mapped.
Senior lawyer and TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee argued that voters cleared before polling phases should be reinstated in the rolls, and raised concerns that receipts had not been issued for documents submitted during the objection stage, raising questions about whether all filings were properly recorded.