Summary
The Election Commission has told the Supreme Court that of 38.2 lakh appeals filed against inclusion or exclusion decisions during West Bengal's Special Intensive Revision (SIR), more than 37.18 lakh remain pending before 19 court-mandated Appellate Tribunals, with only about 1.02 lakh disposed of in six months.
The affidavit followed complaints that pendency data was being kept opaque and came with a district-wise breakdown showing near-total gridlock in places like Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur. The Court is now weighing whether to prioritise appeals from voters seeking re-inclusion.
WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
The EC's September 16 affidavit, filed in response to a Supreme Court order, revealed that 97% of appeals from West Bengal's SIR exercise remain undecided six months after the tribunals were set up, with municipal elections approaching and the EC declining responsibility for tribunal-level delays.
Standard News
The Right to Vote Has No Deadline Attached to It
- And That's the Actual Problem Article 326 gives every adult citizen the right to vote. What it does not give is a deadline by which a wrongly deleted voter's appeal must be decided. That single silence - not any single official's failure - is why 37.18 lakh people in West Bengal currently do not know, with municipal elections weeks away, whether they will be allowed to vote at all.
The
Rule as Designed and the Rule as It Is Working The Representation of the People Act, 1950 sets out how electoral rolls get corrected: claims and objections, then appeal. When West Bengal's Special Intensive Revision produced allegations of mass wrongful deletions, the Supreme Court did something unusual - it didn't just order corrections, it built new machinery, constituting 19 Appellate Tribunals headed by retired High Court judges specifically to hear these appeals fast.
On paper, that is a court fixing an administrative gap with judicial infrastructure. In practice, the infrastructure has no throughput requirement built into it. Six months in, only 1,02,231 of 38,20,683 appeals - barely 2.7% - have been decided.
In Murshidabad, 7,47,921 appeals produced 514 decisions. That is not a tribunal working slowly; that is a tribunal that was never given a disposal target, a staffing formula or a public dashboard and is therefore accountable to no one for the pace at which it moves.
Why the EC's Own Defence Is the Real Story
The most telling line in this affidavit isn't a number - it's the EC distancing itself from the tribunals' pace, arguing that "feasibility, modalities and implementation" of any speed-up mechanism belong to the tribunals themselves, not to directions against the EC.
That is technically accurate and constitutionally revealing: the body responsible for the electoral roll has no lever to force the body reviewing challenges to that roll to move faster. The right to vote was procedurally protected by creating an appeal mechanism, but no one owns the outcome of how quickly that mechanism actually functions - which means a citizen's franchise can be functionally suspended by nobody's specific failure at all, only by a gap between two institutions each pointing at the other.
Why This Matters Beyond West Bengal Justice
Bagchi's question to the EC - whether appeals from disenfranchised voters seeking re-inclusion should be prioritised over exclusion appeals - is the Court now trying to do, case by case, what the original design should have built in: a hierarchy of urgency. Any SIR-style exercise, in any state, will produce this same structural risk unless prioritisation and disposal timelines are written into the process itself, not improvised afterward by a bench under pressure from an election calendar it cannot control.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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Total appeals filed: 38,20,683.
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Appeals still pending: 37,18,452.
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Appeals disposed of: 1,02,231 (about 2.7%).
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19 Appellate Tribunals constituted by the Supreme Court, covering 24 West Bengal districts.
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Murshidabad: 7,47,921 filed, only 514 decided.
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Uttar Dinajpur: 3,03,155 pending, 9,104 disposed.
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Case: Prasenjit Bose vs Election Commission of India, before a Bench led by CJI Surya Kant.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
Priya's read on why the EC's specific legal defence - disowning tribunal pace - is constitutionally more revealing than the pendency numbers themselves.
The exact accountability gap between the Election Commission and the Supreme Court-created tribunals and why neither institution can force the other to move faster.
What Justice Bagchi's prioritisation question signals about how the Court may eventually resolve this - and what that would mean for future SIR exercises in other states.
The specific fix Priya argues the Representation of the People Act framework is missing and why it needs to exist before the next mass roll revision, not after.
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