SIR in Bengal: ECI sets Nov end deadline for completing digitisation of enumeration forms

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has set a November-end deadline to complete digitisation of voter details collected during West Bengal’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

According to officials in the chief electoral officer’s (CEO) office, digitisation of enumeration forms collected by booth-level officers is already underway, with around 50 lakh forms processed so far. The pace of work is expected to accelerate from Sunday to meet the ECI’s target.

The deadline was fixed during an urgent meeting on Saturday evening, attended by West Bengal CEO Manoj Kumar Agarwal, district magistrates-cum-district electoral officers, and other election officials. Senior ECI authorities joined the meeting virtually from New Delhi.

Meanwhile, a four-member ECI team — including deputy election commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, principal secretaries S.B. Joshi and Malay Mallick, and deputy secretary Abhinav Agarwal — will visit West Bengal from 18 to 21 November to review SIR progress. They will assess work in Kolkata, South 24-Parganas, Nadia, Murshidabad, and Malda.

This will be the second visit by a central ECI team since the SIR began on 4 November. Earlier this month, Bharti led a team to review the exercise in North Bengal districts.

The SIR, being conducted in three stages, began on 4 November and is expected to conclude by March 2025. The last such revision in the state was carried out in 2002.

With IANS inputs