With the Election Commission set to publish the final electoral roll after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal Saturday, lakhs of electors who had earlier been cleared by the statutory authority, the Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), are now again facing the possibility of being cut from the rolls because Supreme Court-appointed judicial officers are reviewing the eligibility of 60,06,675 electors, or 8.5% of the total electorate, The Indian Express has learnt.
Over half a dozen EROs and Assistant EROs, whose responsibility it is to maintain electoral rolls, told The Indian Express that they found many cases of names which they had cleared, with documents uploaded, being “reversed” and sent for review after the EC’s micro-observers flagged certain discrepancies.
This number jumped around the last day of hearings held by EROs/AEROs, which was February 14. According to some estimates by officials, the number jumped from a few lakhs to over 60 lakh.
One ERO said the work of collecting enumeration forms and uploading had been done meticulously in the first phase of the SIR in November-December. “The micro-observers were present during the hearings. It was only February 11 onward that they started sending back the cases we had approved for inclusion in the final roll,” the ERO said.
This, even as the February 14 deadline for hearings was approaching. The ERO said this left them with no time to address the shortcomings, if any, in the documents uploaded by them. On February 14, the ERO’s log-in on the ECI’s ECINET platform, through ERONET, stopped showing the option to upload documents, the ERO said. Among the electors approved by the ERO and returned by the micro-observer was a serving senior IAS officer, it is learnt.
Another ERO said the micro-observers in the constituency had not raised any concerns during the hearing phase, but had later sent back thousands of the names for review through ECINET.
Now, as 530 judicial officers from West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand have been tasked with reviewing the documents uploaded for these 60 lakh electors, the EROs and the electors concerned are in the dark. “When I do not know how many electors of my AC (Assembly Constituency) are pending with the judicial officer, what will the voter know,” the ERO asked, adding that the EROs were now no longer involved in the process. The ERO’s log-in, too, no longer showed the pending cases and decisions taken.
As per the Supreme Court order, 530 judges have started working this week to decide whether these voters can be restored to the rolls or are to be deleted.
Official data accessed by The Indian Express shows that the highest number of cases pending adjudication are in the minority-dominated Murshidabad district (11 lakh), followed by Malda (8.28 lakh), South 24 Parganas (5.22 lakh) and North 24 Parganas (5 lakh). Jhargram and Kalimpong had the fewest pending cases at 6,682 and 6,790 cases, respectively.
Until their names are cleared by the judicial officers, these 60 lakh electors will not be able to cast their votes in the soon-to-be-announced Assembly elections, officials said.
The final roll will include their names but with the remark “under adjudication”, which will only be removed in subsequent supplementary lists if the judicial officers reviewing the cases approve them.
The EC, which announced the SIR for the whole country on June 24 last year, has carried out the exercise in 13 states/UTs so far including West Bengal, but a series of unprecedented decisions have played out in the state.
Asked about the West Bengal situation, Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Agarwal said: “A very uncertain environment was created because of which people repeatedly went to the apex court. This has led to the precedent being created of judicial officers being appointed for the revision.”
Among the petitioners who have challenged the SIR order in the Supreme Court are West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
To understand how it came to be that judicial officers were appointed to review the decisions taken by the statutory authority, The Indian Express visited three districts and met with many EROs and AEROs along with roll observers. Apart from 8,100 micro-observers, the EC appointed 37 roll observers and a special roll observer for the state.
While EROs and AEROs described a series of changing instructions and last-minute updates to the ECI’s centralised portal for EROs/AEROs as well as the ground-level Booth Level Officers (BLOs), observers and officials of the ECI in the state alleged irregularities in the documents uploaded by the BLOs and EROs. Among the issues raised were uploading of AI-generated Voter ID and a range of IDs apart from the 13 listed by the EC in its October 27, 2025 instruction for the SIR in West Bengal and eight other states and three UTs.
A roll observer told The Indian Express: “First of all, micro-observers never approved or rejected any hearing but they raised questions on a few cases. We saw they raised questions in some cases where male persons had given ICDS certificates as residential proof which were exclusively for lactating mothers… They also raised questions in some cases where no documents were uploaded but were approved by EROs and DEOs.”
“We had a huge number of cases of hearings where no documents were uploaded which is very unnatural. Now, judicial officers will not only check uploaded data but also physical documents which electors provided during hearing. Otherwise, lakhs of genuine voters will be excluded from the electoral roll,” the roll observer said.
Another roll observer alleged: “The state government did not provide sufficient work force in the initial stage of SIR hearing which led to many problems and delayed the uploading process.” But, he also said: “In other states, ECI allowed electors to provide documents during submission of enumeration forms. But it was not done in West Bengal. It may have delayed and complicated the process of SIR hearing in West Bengal.”
According to Section 13B of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, electoral rolls in the country are prepared and revised by an ERO who is a government officer appointed by the EC in consultation with the state government. It is only the ERO or AERO who can issue notices, conduct hearings and pass orders whether a person is eligible or not to be an elector.
But, in West Bengal, the EC, on December 19 last year, appointed micro-observers, around 8,100 Central government employees, to check the documents submitted by electors and to be present during the hearings. The EC did not do so in any other state.
While the EC has told the Supreme Court that the micro observers are only meant to help the ERO/AEROs, the Trinamool Congress has alleged that the micro observers have usurped the powers of the ERO/AERO.
One ERO said the work of collecting enumeration forms and uploading had been done meticulously in the first phase of the SIR in November-December. 
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