Kolkata, Jan 12 West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday once again wrote a letter to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, flagging procedural lapses in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in the state. This is her fifth letter to the CEC since the poll panel began the SIR exercise in Bengal.
Sharing a copy of the letter in her official Facebook account, CM Banerjee said such procedural lapses are leading to undue harassment of citizens and their wrongful disenfranchisement.
"In continuation of my earlier letters, I again wish to draw your attention regarding following two serious procedural lapses being observed during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which are resulting in undue harassment of citizens, wrongful deletion of eligible electors and their consequent disenfranchisement," CM Banerjee wrote in the letter.
Elaborating on the procedural lapses, the Chief Minister wrote, "It has been noticed that during hearings conducted as part of the SIR, electors are submitting requisite documents in support of their eligibility. However, in several cases, no proper acknowledgment or receipt is being issued for the documents submitted.
"Subsequently, at the stage of verification or hearing, these documents are reported as 'not found' or 'not available on record,' and on that basis, names of electors are being deleted from the electoral rolls.
"Such a procedure is fundamentally flawed and untenable. The non-issuance of documentary acknowledgment deprives electors of proof of submission and places them at the mercy of internal record-keeping deficiencies."
Pointing out another flaw in the SIR process, CM Banerjee wrote, "In the absence of any digitised database of the last SIR, the manual voter lists of 2002, including those published in vernacular scripts were scanned and translated into English using A.l. tools for digitisation. During this transliteration, serious errors occurred in elector particulars such as name, age, sex, relationship and guardian's name. These errors have resulted in large-scale data mismatches, leading to many genuine voters being categorised as 'logical discrepancies'."
Banerjee mentioned that over the last 23 years, a large number of electors have submitted Form-8 along with valid government-issued documents, and after due quasi-judicial hearings by EROs/AEROs, their particulars were duly corrected and incorporated in the current Electoral Roll-2025.
"The Commission is now disregarding its own statutory processes followed consistently over two decades and is compelling electors to once again establish their identity and eligibility.
"Such an approach -- disowning its own actions and mechanisms spanning more than two decades -- is arbitrary, illogical and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution of India," she said.
It may be noted that CM Banerjee had written four previous mails to the CEC. However, none of them resulted in any response from the CEC.
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