Kolkata: The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday announced that over 11,000 “unmapped” voters in West Bengal have been identified as eligible for exclusion from the final voters’ list following the hearing sessions on the claims and objections on the draft voters’ list conducted so far.
The hearings for 9,30,993 “unmapped” voters have been completed so far, as per the latest information available from the Commission, and out of them names of 11,472 “unmapped” voters have been found eligible for exclusion in the final voters’ list to be published on February 14.
Currently, the hearing sessions are on for the “unmapped” voters, that is, voters in whose cases links with the voters’ list of 2002 could not be established either through “self-mapping” or through “progeny-mapping”. The last time that the SIR was conducted in West Bengal was in 2002.
Currently, the hearings for the “unmapped voters” are on. In the next stage, there will be hearings for the “logical discrepancy” cases identified in the course of progeny mapping. “Logical discrepancy” cases are those in which weird family-tree data have been detected in the course of “progeny-mapping”.
The draft voters’ list in West Bengal was published on December 16 last year. The hearing sessions on the claims and objections to that draft voters’ list started on December 27.
The final voters’ list is scheduled to be published on February 14. Shortly after that, the full bench of the ECI will come to West Bengal, and soon after that, the polling dates for the crucial Assembly polls in the state will be announced.
The SIR exercise in West Bengal had been marred with controversies since the beginning, with the ruling Trinamool Congress constantly accusing the poll panel of steering the revision exercise as per the whims of the Union Government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
On the other hand, the BJP had been claiming that the main reason behind the ruling party’s opposition to SIR was the fear of the names of its dedicated vote bank of illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya voters being excluded from the voters’ list.
(IANS)
