EC dissent row: Bengal SIR concerns flagged but unheeded, sources say

Months before two Election Commissioners formally objected to the Election Commission's handling of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, election officials in West Bengal had internally raised concerns about software-generated logical discrepancies, changing instructions, and restrictions on field officers' ability to function, sources in the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer's office told The Federal. The concerns were documented in memos dated December 27 and 29, 2025, which noted that the digital system was marking electors as 'unmapped' even when hard copies of the 2002 electoral roll showed a linkage, potentially generating wrongful hearing notices.

Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has questioned the legality and necessity of the SIR exercise, arguing that India's electoral rolls have been effectively maintained for decades, The Hindu reported. Meanwhile, The News Minute reported that the SIR has flagged 92,87,577 electors in Telangana alone as either 'unmapped' or having anomalies, and that system-generated discrepancies are being treated as grounds for citizenship doubt rather than as starting points for verification. The Supreme Court's 1995 judgment in Lal Babu Hussain, which held that a person whose name is on the roll must be told why a citizenship doubt has arisen, provides relevant procedural safeguards.