Thirteen lakh vs 50.89 lakh. Two sets of data from the Election Commission, both dated January 18, have this mismatch in the number of voters served notices under one category as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.
Over 1.16 crore electors had been flagged in the state for “logical discrepancies” in their documents after the first round of SIR, and asked to appear for hearings to prove their eligibility as voters. The hearings are currently on in Bengal, with one of the discrepancies flagged being six or more voters naming the same person as a parent.
The SIR process in Bengal, along with eight other states and three Union Territories, began in October last year.
On January 18, the EC submitted data through a sworn affidavit in the Supreme Court in response to a petition challenging the SIR. The data in this affidavit shows that approximately 13 lakh notices had been generated in West Bengal for voters who shared the name of their parents with six or more people, in the submitted documents.
However, data with the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO’s) Office, also dated January 18, accessed by The Indian Express, shows 50.89 lakh people identified in the same category of “6 progeny or more”.
The CEO’s chart also gives a district-wise breakup of those identified for “logical discrepancy” in this category, along with other categories such as fathers’ name mismatch, age difference with parents being 50 years or more, and age difference with grandparents being 40 years or less.
The total number is in line with the earlier figure of 1.16 crore (more precisely, 1,16,91,908) voters identified for notices due to “logical discrepancies”.
The EC affidavit in the Supreme Court was the first time since the SIR began that it provided data of the notices generated by it.
Giving a break-up of its notices generated on the ground of “6 progeny or more”, the EC said 2.06 lakh electors had been mapped with more than six children, 8,682 with more than 10 children, 50 with more than 20 children, 14 with more than 30 children, 10 each mapped with more than 40 and above 50 children, seven mapped with more than 100 children, and two mapped with more than 200 children.
While the EC did not give the total figure for all such notices, it adds up to around 13.26 lakh.
The EC defended the notices on grounds of “6 progeny or more” saying it had to “ensure that details of citizens of West Bengal are not misused through mapping to any name where there is no proof of parent-children relationship”. The EC added: “It was noticed that in many cases electors had marked some unrelated person as their parents to establish a link to the previous SIR electoral roll.”
The West Bengal CEO office data, generated on the same day, putting the number of such notices at 50.89 lakh (or, 50,89,519 precisely), is incidentally nearly double the data it had released in December 2025. As reported by The Indian Express on December 17, the CEO had put the total number of electors falling in “6 progeny or more” category then at 23.64 lakh (23,64,030 to be exact).
A query sent to the EC Monday on what the actual number of notices in this category was, and if that had changed, did not elicit a response. The CEO office in Bengal refused to comment, with sources distancing themselves from the notices, saying these were generated by the EC.
As part of the SIR, all voters are required to give details of themselves or their parents in the last intensive revision of rolls; in the case of Bengal, the last such exercise was in 2002. For the first time, the EC is deploying a software to flag electors for “logical discrepancies” as part of the SIR.
The EC announced a nation-wide SIR in June last year, beginning with Bihar, ahead of the Assembly elections in the state. In October 2025, it announced the next phase of the SIR in nine states and three UTs, including Bengal. The final rolls are to be published on February 14 for all the states and UTs, except Uttar Pradesh.
As opposed to the annual Special Summary Revision, when existing electoral rolls are updated with deletion and additions, the intensive revision entails preparation of rolls from scratch, which has not been done by the EC in the past 20 years.
The EC’s decision to conduct the SIR and the process adopted, including asking all electors to fill up forms and certain categories to submit documents to prove eligibility, akin to citizenship, has been challenged in the Supreme Court.
