ECI's Second Bengal Visit: Why SIR Progress Faces Special Scrutiny

This is the second West Bengal visit of the central ECI team during the current month to review the revision exercise, which indicates that the poll panel's special focus was on the progress of SIR in the state.

The four members of the team will include the Deputy Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Bharti, two principal secretaries of ECI, S.B. Joshi and Malay Mallick, and the deputy secretary, Abhinav Agarwal.

The central team will arrive in Kolkata on Tuesday and will be in the state till November 21. During the current visit, the team will review the SIR progress in Kolkata, South 24 Parganas, Nadia, Murshidabad, and Malda.

In the previous visit earlier this month, the central ECI team reviewed the SIR progress in three districts in North Bengal.

The first stage of the three-stage SIR in West Bengal started on November 4. The distribution of enumeration forms among the voters has almost been completed, the sources have said.

As per the latest information available from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, the process of digitisation of the enumeration forms collected by booth-level officers has already started, and digitisation has been completed for over one crore enumeration forms.

As of October 27, the total number of electors in West Bengal as per the electoral roll is 7,66,37,529.

The entire process is expected to be completed by March next year. The last time the SIR was conducted in West Bengal was in 2002.

Voters whose names or their parents' names were on the 2002 voter list will automatically be deemed as valid voters in the SIR process. And those voters whose names or their parents' names were not in the 2002 voter list will have to submit any of the 11 documents specified by the ECI to retain their names in the electoral rolls.

- IANS