Kolkata, Dec 29: The first day of hearings under West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll concluded smoothly on Sunday, with the process being carried out under strict supervision across the state, election officials said.
The hearings began at 10 a.m. and were monitored by around 4,600 micro observers. Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) conducted the proceedings, with one ERO and 10 AEROs overseeing hearings in each Assembly constituency.
Hearings were held simultaneously in all 294 Assembly constituencies at 11 tables per constituency, taking the total number of tables to 3,234. On average, 100 to 150 voters were heard at each table. The Election Commission (EC) said the final electoral roll will be published on February 14 after completion of the hearing process.
From early morning, hearing centres in Kolkata and several districts witnessed heavy footfall, with voters whose names were missing from the draft electoral roll arriving with documents for verification.
Meanwhile, the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, has decided that certain voters marked as “unmapped” will not be called for hearings. These voters are those whose names or lineage are clearly available in the 2002 electoral roll but could not be digitally mapped in the Booth Level Officer (BLO) application due to technical issues during data conversion.
District Election Officers (DEOs) have been instructed that no hearing notices should be served to such voters. Any notices already generated will be kept on hold with the concerned EROs or AEROs. Election officials said the number of unmapped voters in the draft roll is likely to decline as several cases were linked to technical glitches.
According to figures released by the EC earlier in December, more than 3.1 million voters out of West Bengal’s 76.6 million electorate could not initially be mapped with the 2002 electoral roll.
In a letter sent to all DEOs on Saturday, the state’s additional CEO said incomplete conversion of the 2002 electoral roll data from PDF to CSV format had led to linkage issues in the BLO app. As a result, several electors were marked unmapped despite having valid self or progeny linkage in the hard copies of the 2002 roll authenticated by district authorities and published on the CEO’s website.
A senior poll panel official said voters affected solely by technical glitches would no longer be treated as unmapped or called for hearings. However, those whose names or family details do not appear in the 2002 roll will continue to be called for verification.
The EC has also clarified that while hearing notices may have been generated by the system in such cases, they should not be served and should remain with the EROs. BLOs have been instructed to visit these electors, verify details, take photographs and upload them for record purposes. If discrepancies are detected later, such electors may still be called for hearings after due notice.
The SIR exercise was launched in West Bengal on November 4, and the draft electoral roll was published on December 16. More than 5.8 million names of absent, shifted, deceased and duplicate voters were removed from the draft roll.
Hearings of unmapped voters began on Saturday and sparked political controversy after several family members of Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar were called for verification. The EC said the action was taken as there was no linkage found in the enumeration forms, in line with prescribed norms.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has criticised the exercise, alleging widespread errors in voter mapping. TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee has also warned of protests if the EC does not release details of voters flagged for discrepancies.
The TMC further intensified its criticism after reports emerged of elderly and ailing voters being summoned for hearings. Senior party leader and state minister Shashi Panja termed the process “inhumane” and questioned why officials could not visit such voters at their residences.
Responding to the criticism, BJP leader and advocate Tarunjyoti Tiwari said the draft roll was not final and that political parties’ Booth Level Agents were verifying entries. He added that names could still be added or removed after verification and urged parties to focus on scrutiny rather than protests.
