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This is the fourth of a series on how the adjudication process of the Special Intensive Revision in West Bengal continues in Bengal. Read part one, here, part two, here, and part three, here.

Kolkata: Samserganj in Bengal’s Murshidabad has 80,234 people waiting to find out whether they will be on the electoral rolls since the special intensive revision or SIR. The tribunal that exists to hear those appeals has decided 12 of the appeals by the 80,234 people. The constituency was decided in the April assembly polls of this year by 7,587 votes.

What was done to Samserganj before the election has already been reported by The Wire. Of a draft roll of 2,36,040 electors, 1,08,400 or 45.9% of the constituency were flagged, to be placed under adjudication. This was despite the fact that only 2,459 of the 1,08,400 – under 1% – had failed to match themselves to the 2002 rolls which the special intensive revision used as its base. 

As much as 68.98% of the voter list was struck off.

On the early morning of April 22, the day before Samserganj voted, the Election Commission published the appellate tribunal supplementary lists for all 247 of its polling stations. The tribunals had cleared one name in Samserganj. By August 7, three and a half months later, the tribunal had restored another nine people in Samserganj and refused three.

Draft roll, adjudication and unmapped figures as reported by The Wire on 22 April 2026, at https://thewire.in/government/west-bengal-samserganj-sir-exclusions-muslim-voters-tmc-congress-bjp-one-thiird. Tribunal decisions from the Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, RTI Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated 17.08.2026. The Commission’s adjudication return records 74,775 marked not eligible, while its published list of those electors carries 71,985 names.

Samserganj is the sharpest instance of a pattern that runs through 49 West Bengal constituencies, and it describes what has happened to the remedy the Supreme Court ordered when it became clear how many people the revision had removed.

In those 49 seats, the number of electors struck off the rolls was larger than the gap between the winner and the runner-up. That was reported by The Wire in its analysis of West Bengal assembly election results. What has happened in the four months since is the subject of this article, and the answer is that almost nothing has.

Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report and Individuals under Adjudication Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the........

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