KOLKATA: The pre-hearing phase of Bengal’s SIR of electoral rolls is nearing completion with nearly 100% of 7.6 crore voters’ data having already been digitised. But, between 28 lakh and 30 lakh voters will, in all probability, have to attend poll officials’ hearings if they want to stay on the rolls as they remain unmapped (data not matching with the 2002 roll).
All these unmapped voters will get notices to appear for in-person hearings and will have to produce one of the 13 SIR documents that EC has approved for Bengal. The hearings will be held between Dec 16 and Feb 7 next year before the publication of the final electoral rolls on Feb 14. Besides this number, till Saturday afternoon, 54.6 lakh voters remained untraceable or were categorised as dead or duplicate. These names will be deleted from the SIR draft list to be published on Dec 16, officials said. EC’s deadline to complete this phase of SIR ends Thursday.
“A little over 7% (54.6 lakh) of the 99.4% digitised enumeration forms are now ‘uncollectible’ and these names will not be included in the draft SIR roll,” a senior EC official said. But voters can challenge and file fresh enrolment applications under Form 6 if they want to challenge this. Around 23.7 lakh voters have died, 19 lakh have shifted, 10.1 lakh are untraceable, and 1.2 lakh are duplicate voters. EC will publish a separate list of voters who have collected forms but are yet to return them to BLOs. These names (around 39,000), too, will not be included in draft rolls.
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