The Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, is the Election Commission’s exercise to clean up voter rolls. In West Bengal, lakhs of names were excluded, and 22.21 lakh appeals are now pending before appellate tribunals.

The EC has launched a door-to-door drive so that voters left out of the rolls can re-enrol using Form 6, the standard form for new voters. But it has told the Supreme Court that tribunal cases cannot use this route.

The reason is legal. Tribunal appellants are “already subject to judicial proceedings”, so their cases must be decided by the tribunals, not through fresh Form 6 applications to electoral officers. Running both routes would create two parallel systems for the same voters.

The 19 tribunals were set up on March 21 under Supreme Court oversight. Of the 38.31 lakh appeals filed, only 1.26 lakh have been decided. Critics like P. Chidambaram note that 91 to 93 per cent of decided appeals restored voters’ names, questioning why the long tribunal route remains the only option.