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Consider Kerala request to extend SIR date: Supreme Court to EC

A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi termed the state’s request “just and fair” and permitted it to submit a proposal for extension of the last date with reasons for the same to the ECI.

3 min readNew DelhiDec 3, 2025 06:01 AM IST

Consider Kerala request to extend SIR date: SC to EC

It asked the ECI to “consider it objectively and sympathetically and make a decision by the day after tomorrow”.

The Supreme Court Tuesday asked the Election Commission of India to “consider sympathetically” Kerala’s request to extend the date for submission of enumeration forms under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.

A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi termed the state’s request “just and fair” and permitted it to submit a proposal for extension of the last date with reasons for the same to the ECI. It asked the ECI to “consider it objectively and sympathetically and make a decision by the day after tomorrow”.

The state had moved the SC seeking extension of time as the local body elections are scheduled for December 9 and 11 followed by counting on December 13 and that holding the SIR and polls simultaneously raises logistical issues.

Senior Advocate Rakesh Dwivedi appearing for the poll body informed the court that it had extended the original date from December 4 to 11. The state said more time needed to be allowed to government employees put on election duty to submit their own forms.

Senior Advocate Maninder Singh, also appearing for the ECI, said that more than 98 per cent of forms are distributed and more than 88 per cent are digitised.

Dwivedi said the Election Commission was not facing any problem with the conduct of the local body elections as the staff allotted for both are different.

While a total of 1.76 lakh staff have been allocated for the polls, 25,468 persons have been deputed for the SIR process, he pointed out.

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The CJI remarked that the constitutional machinery doesn’t seem to have any problem, but some political parties have problems.

The state government had earlier approached the High Court which, however, refused to intervene and asked the state to move the SC.

On November 11, the SC had requested jurisdictional high courts to keep in abeyance/defer the writ proceedings, if any, with regard to validity of SIR in their states as it is considering the issue.

Meanwhile, arguing on petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the ongoing SIR exercise, Senior Advocate Abhishek Singhvi told the bench that the procedure adopted by the ECI raises concerns of an indirect National Register of Citizens (NRC) without the approval of Parliament.