India’s Supreme Court on Monday said it would seek a report later in the day from the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court after complaints that appellate tribunals set up under West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, were not functioning properly, sharpening scrutiny of a process already under legal and political pressure ahead of the Assembly election. The issue was mentioned before a bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi by senior advocate Devadatt Kamat, who said the tribunals were failing to give affected voters an effective remedy. According to courtroom accounts published on Monday, Kamat told the bench that lawyers were not being allowed to represent parties and that only online or computer-based applications were being accepted, creating hardship for people seeking relief against exclusion from or inclusion in the electoral rolls.
The court’s response matters because the appellate mechanism has become central to the legality and credibility of the Bengal voter-roll exercise. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court had underlined the need for a robust appeal process while declining to step into individual cases at the first instance, effectively directing aggrieved voters to these tribunals. That made Monday’s complaint more than a procedural objection: it went to whether the safeguard identified by the court was working in practice.
The dispute has unfolded against the backdrop of an unusually large electoral verification drive in West Bengal. Reporting over the past week has described the SIR as a mass revision exercise involving scrutiny of millions of names on the electoral rolls, with judicially staffed appellate forums created to hear objections and appeals from those affected. The scale of that exercise has fuelled concern about the possibility of wrongful deletions, administrative bottlenecks and unequal access to remedies, especially for poorer voters, migrant workers and people living far from designated hearing centres.
Court reporting also shows the bench has been wary of repeated mentions and serial applications in the matter, an indication that the litigation has become both urgent and crowded as the election timetable advances. At the same time, the judges have signalled that a functioning appeal system is indispensable if mistakes are to be corrected before polling. That has placed Calcutta High Court oversight and the readiness of the tribunals at the centre of the controversy.
There have also been mixed signals on ground preparedness. One report last week said 16 of the 19 appellate tribunals had started functioning, with judicial officers working through the weekend and a Calcutta High Court judge helping coordinate arrangements. Yet the same reporting said the digital dashboard meant to track hearings and disposals was not operational, making it difficult to assess how many appeals had actually been heard or decided. That gap between formal commencement and verifiable functioning appears to have fed Monday’s complaints before the Supreme Court.
The legal contest is being watched closely because it carries consequences beyond one state’s electoral administration. Voter-roll revision is an accepted part of election management, but it is also one of the most sensitive exercises in a democracy because errors can affect the franchise directly. Where revision is intensive and compressed by electoral deadlines, the fairness of the process depends not only on administrative accuracy but on accessible, transparent and prompt redress. The Bengal case has therefore become a test of how institutions balance roll purification with the constitutional imperative that eligible citizens are not wrongly shut out.
One of the sharper points raised by lawyers has been representational access. If appellants cannot engage counsel, or if filings are effectively limited to digital modes, the burden can fall heaviest on those least equipped to navigate formal procedures. That concern has particular force in a state-wide revision where affected electors may be elderly, economically vulnerable or located far from the tribunal venue. The allegation placed before the court was not merely that there were delays, but that the remedy itself could become illusory if procedural barriers persisted.
For the Election Commission and the judicial officers involved, the countervailing argument is that a massive exercise of this kind inevitably creates transitional strain, and that setting up tribunals, staffing them and processing appeals at speed is a demanding administrative task. Reports last week noted judicial officers putting in extra hours to make the mechanism operational. That suggests the controversy may turn less on whether the system exists on paper than on whether it is functioning uniformly, transparently and in a manner that voters can realistically use.