Over 37 Lakh Special Intensive Revision Appeals Still Pending in West Bengal's Tribunals, EC Tells the Supreme Court

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The news

The Election Commission has informed the Supreme Court that over 37 lakh of a total 38 lakh appeals arising out of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal are still pending before 19 Appellate Tribunals. The EC said only 1,02,231 appeals have been disposed of. The Appellate Tribunals were constituted by the Supreme Court over six months ago. The EC's affidavit, dated 16 September, covers appeals across 24 districts: 38,20,683 appeals were submitted regarding both inclusions and exclusions during the SIR exercise, and the number pending is 37,18,452. Of the 38 lakh appeals, only about seven lakh were filed by disenfranchised voters; the remaining 31 lakh were filed by the EC or by other objectors seeking to exclude more people from the roll. District annexures show Murshidabad with 7,47,921 appeals filed and only 514 decided; Uttar Dinajpur with 3,03,155 pending and 9,104 disposed; and Purba Bardhaman with 2,80,029 appeals and only 131 decided. Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan and advocate Neha Rathi appeared for petitioner Prasenjit Bose, chairperson of the SIR Committee of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, who had complained that pendency and disposal rates were being kept secret; the affidavit followed a Supreme Court order of 28 August. Justice Joymalya Bagchi, on a Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant, observed that the Court would consider whether appeals by disenfranchised voters seeking re-inclusion should be prioritised. Separately in Delhi, 728 voters from a Yamuna riverbank jhuggi cluster in the Bela Estate polling area of the Chandni Chowk Assembly constituency have sought return to the draft roll; the pre-SIR roll had 4,142 voters there, 728 were placed on the 'absent, shifted, dead and duplicate' list, and of about 550 residents still living there, 462 have submitted Form 6.

The chain in one line: Intensive revision → mass inclusion and exclusion appeals → 19 tribunals for 38 lakh cases → 97% pendency → bypolls approach with the roll unsettled

Static syllabus linkage

Article 324 and the Representation of the People Act, 1950 govern the roll. Preparation of electoral rolls is entrusted to the Election Commission under Article 324, and the machinery — electoral registration officers, claims and objections, and appeals — sits in the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Form 6 is the application for inclusion of a name in the roll, which is why the Delhi cluster's 462 Form 6 filings are the operative fact there.
Universal adult suffrage is an Article 326 guarantee. Article 326 provides that elections to the House of the People and to State Legislative Assemblies shall be on the basis of adult suffrage, with every citizen not less than eighteen years of age and not otherwise disqualified entitled to be registered. A roll revision that removes an eligible citizen is therefore not an administrative inconvenience; it touches the constitutional basis of the franchise.
The right to vote's legal character is contested and that matters here. Indian courts have generally treated the right to vote as a statutory right conferred by the Representation of the People Acts, while treating the freedom to express a choice at the ballot as flowing from Article 19(1)(a). Whichever characterisation is used, the remedy for wrongful exclusion is procedural — appeal, and then writ — which is exactly the channel that has now silted up.
The Appellate Tribunals here are a court-created layer. The tribunals hearing these appeals were constituted following Supreme Court orders over six months ago. That is worth noting precisely: this is not a standing statutory tier but a bespoke mechanism created to absorb the volume generated by the revision, which is why its capacity was never designed against the caseload it received.

Why UPSC loves this

Electoral-roll integrity has become a running GS2 thread. Questions on free and fair elections used to turn on model code and expenditure. The current thread runs through the roll itself — inclusion, exclusion, duplication and the machinery for correcting error. Three consecutive editions of this magazine have carried SIR cards, which is itself the signal.
Numbers with a denominator are what the examiner rewards. 'Lakhs of appeals pending' is a headline. '37,18,452 pending of 38,20,683 filed, with 1,02,231 disposed across 19 tribunals' is an answer. Carry the ratio, not the adjective.
The composition of the appeals is the analytical hook. Seven lakh appeals by excluded voters against 31 lakh by the Commission and other objectors seeking further exclusion inverts the intuitive reading of the story. UPSC likes facts that reverse the obvious inference.

Prelims nuggets

Article 324 vests superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls in the Election Commission of India.
Article 326 provides for elections to the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies on the basis of adult suffrage, at not less than eighteen years of age.
Form 6 under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 is the application for inclusion of a name in the electoral roll.
'ASDD' in roll revision practice denotes the absent, shifted, dead and duplicate category of entries proposed for deletion.
Preparation of electoral rolls for parliamentary and assembly constituencies is governed by the Representation of the People Act, 1950; conduct of elections by the Act of 1951.

Analysis

A 97% pendency rate is not a backlog, it is a non-functioning remedy. 1,02,231 disposals against 38,20,683 filings is a disposal rate of under three per cent across six months. Murshidabad's 514 decisions against 7,47,921 appeals and Purba Bardhaman's 131 against 2,80,029 are worse still. When the appellate route is this slow, the deletion made at the revision stage is, for practical purposes, final — the remedy exists on paper and the outcome is decided by the first administrative decision.
The composition of the appeals reframes the entire dispute. Only about seven lakh appeals came from people seeking to get back on the roll; 31 lakh were filed by the Commission or other objectors seeking to remove more names. That means the tribunals are mostly processing proposed exclusions, while the minority of appeals with a citizen's franchise at stake waits in the same undifferentiated queue. Justice Bagchi's question — whether re-inclusion appeals should be prioritised — follows directly from that arithmetic, and it is the single most useful line in the story.
Capacity was never matched to the exercise that generated the load. Nineteen tribunals for 24 districts and 38 lakh appeals is roughly two lakh appeals per tribunal. No adjudicatory body decides two lakh matters in six months while giving each a hearing. The design failure is upstream: an intensive revision was launched without provisioning the appellate capacity its own error rate would require.
The Delhi cluster shows what exclusion looks like at ground level. In one polling area, 728 of 4,142 voters went onto the ASDD list; about 550 people are still living there and 462 have filed Form 6 to get back. The pattern is the familiar one — people whose housing is informal or was demolished are the hardest to verify and the easiest to mark as shifted. The administrative category 'shifted' does a great deal of work in a city where the poor move within the same ward.
Bypolls make pendency a substantive, not procedural, problem. Nandigram and Rejinagar vote on 6 October. An appeal decided after polling day restores a name to a roll for a future election but cannot restore the vote that was not cast. Timeliness in electoral adjudication is therefore not a service-delivery metric; it is the difference between a remedy and a formality.

Possible Mains question

"An appellate remedy that cannot be exercised within the electoral cycle is not a remedy at all. Examine this proposition in the context of large-scale revision of electoral rolls."

Model approach

Frame the constitutional stake at the start. Article 326's adult suffrage and Article 324's entrustment of the roll to the Commission. One line establishing that wrongful exclusion is a constitutional injury, not a clerical one, sets the register for the whole answer.
Use the numbers as the argument, not as decoration. 38,20,683 filed, 37,18,452 pending, 1,02,231 disposed, 19 tribunals, six months. Then the district figures. The proposition in the question is proved by arithmetic, so do the arithmetic.
Make the composition point the analytical centre. Seven lakh re-inclusion appeals inside a queue of 38 lakh, most of which seek further exclusion. Argue that undifferentiated queuing of qualitatively different claims is itself a design flaw, and that triage by consequence is the correction.
Propose remedies that match the diagnosis. Prioritised listing of re-inclusion appeals; a deadline tied to the poll calendar rather than to the filing date; a presumption in favour of continuance on the roll where an elector appears in person with proof of residence; and capacity provisioned in advance in proportion to the revision's expected error rate.
Conclude on the asymmetry of errors. End by naming the asymmetry that should govern the design: wrongly including one ineligible name dilutes a vote marginally, while wrongly excluding one eligible citizen extinguishes a vote entirely. A system that treats both errors as equal has chosen the wrong default.

Administrator's brainstorm

You are the Electoral Registration Officer for a constituency containing a riverbank cluster where 728 names went onto the ASDD list. About 550 residents still live there. How do you correct this without simply restoring every name?

Go there. The error is a verification error and it will not be fixed from the office, because the problem is that informal housing does not generate the documentary trail the form expects. Hold a camp at the cluster with the booth-level officer, accept Form 6 with any of the permitted proofs, and use field verification by the BLO plus attestation of residence as the primary evidence rather than demanding a document the resident cannot possess. Where a name was marked 'shifted' but the person is physically present and identified, record that finding and restore. Publish the list of restored and rejected names at the site itself with reasons, so that a rejected person knows what to appeal against. And send a report upward on why 728 of 4,142 were flagged in one area — a 17% flag rate in a single polling area is a method problem, not a population problem.

Nineteen tribunals cannot decide 37 lakh appeals before the bypoll. As the officer coordinating them, what triage do you propose?

Propose written triage, because informal prioritisation will be attacked as favouritism. Separate the docket into appeals by individuals seeking re-inclusion in the two constituencies actually going to the poll, appeals by individuals elsewhere, and objections filed by the Commission or third parties seeking exclusion. List the first category on a daily board with a short standard hearing, because that is the only category where delay destroys the right rather than postponing it. Seek the Court's approval for the triage rather than adopting it administratively — the same order that protects the elector protects the officer. And place on record what the tribunals can actually deliver at current capacity, so that nobody later pretends the timetable was achievable.

Political workers from both sides offer to 'help' by submitting bulk Form 6 applications and bulk objections. What is your position?

Accept what the law permits and refuse what it does not. Any elector may file a claim and an objection, and bulk filing is not by itself illegal — but each application must be individually signed and each objection must disclose the objector and the ground, because a bundle of unsigned forms is not a set of claims, it is a list. Set up a receipt-with-acknowledgement counter so that every filing is traceable to a named person, and publish weekly counts of claims and objections received by party-affiliated filers alongside those received directly. Transparency is the only defence against the accusation, which will certainly come from whichever side loses, that the roll was manipulated in your office.