West Bengal Final Voter List Published After SIR, Adds New Categories

During the revision exercise, more than 58 lakh names, including deceased, duplicate and shifted voters, were found eligible for deletion and excluded from the draft roll released in December.

The updated list will feature two additional categories, "under adjudication" and "deleted", alongside the names of verified voters.

West Bengal's Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Manoj Kumar Agarwal told media persons on Thursday that the "under adjudication" category will have the names of those voters whose identity documents will continue to remain under the process of adjudication by the judicial officers appointed specially for the purpose as per the order of the Supreme Court.

"In the final voters' list, this category of voters will be enlisted in the 'under adjudication' category," he said.

It is learnt that supplementary lists will be published in due course with the names of the "under adjudication" category voters, whose names will be cleared by the judicial officers in the course of the judicial adjudication.

The third category in the final voters' list will be those voters who have been excluded during the entire course of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise that started in November last year. The names of these excluded voters will appear in the final voters' list under the "deleted' category, Agarwal said.

CEO's office sources said that these three categories in the final voters' list are aimed at making the entire system transparent and also to make the voters aware of their respective positions. However, the Commission is yet to come to a final decision about many voters who have been categorised under the "logical discrepancy" category, which means the voters in whose cases weird family-tree data was detected during the course of "progeny mapping".

There were 7.66 crore voters in West Bengal at the time of the announcement of the SIR. More than 58 lakh names were removed from that list, including those who were dead, absent, duplicate, or missing. The number of voters in the draft list published in December last year stands at 7.08 crore.

- IANS