While there was no official statewide figure for deletions, EC sources told PTI that more than 1.35 lakh voters’ names may have been removed in Bankura district alone.
The revised rolls classify roughly 7.08 crore electors into three categories — “approved”, “deleted” and “under adjudication”. The last category refers to cases currently under scrutiny by judicial officers, with final decisions on inclusion or deletion expected in supplementary lists.
The SIR exercise began on November 4 last year with distribution of enumeration forms and took 116 days to provisionally conclude, amid political controversy, changes in document-verification norms and legal challenges.
Draft rolls released on December 16 showed the electorate shrinking from 7.66 crore — based on names present in the rolls until August 2025 — to 7.08 crore, with over 58 lakh entries removed due to death, migration, duplication or voters being untraceable.
A second phase involved hearings for 1.67 crore electors, including 1.36 crore flagged for “logical discrepancies” and 31 lakh whose records lacked mapping. Around 60 lakh voters remain under adjudication on discrepancy grounds. The SIR is the first statewide revision of this scale since 2002 and was undertaken as a statutory clean-up ahead of a major upcoming election. (WIth inputs from PTI)
