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New Delhi: West Bengal’s latest electoral-roll revision does not point to one uniform statewide pattern. Instead, the assembly-level data suggest two distinct stories unfolding at once: a heavy concentration of voters marked under adjudication in the border belt, and a sharp contraction of rolls in Kolkata and nearby urban constituencies driven more by deletions than adjudication.

An analysis of all 294 assembly constituencies in the state shows that the 2025 pre-draft electorate stood at 7.66 crore, while the 2026 final total fell to 7.04 crore. That is a net decline of about 61.8 lakhs names, or 8.06%. Between the pre-draft and draft stages alone, the rolls shrank by about 7.60%. In the final 2026 list, about 60.1 lakhs voters were marked as under adjudication, equal to 8.53% of the final electorate.

But those statewide numbers flatten an important geographic divide.

The most striking concentration of under-adjudication appears in the border districts, especially Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur. District-level aggregation shows Malda with an average constituency under-adjudication rate of about 27.78%, Uttar Dinajpur at 22.51%, and Murshidabad at 20.10%. That is far above the state average and far above most non-border districts. 

Yet, interestingly, the overall shrinkage of the rolls is not confined to this border belt. The average net roll decline from pre-draft to final is remarkably similar in border districts (-8.05%) and non-border districts (-8.37%). This reveals a critical nuance: while the adjudication burden is heavily concentrated at the border, the actual disappearance of voters is a statewide phenomenon.

At the constituency level, the clustering is even more dramatic. The highest under-adjudication rates in the state are found in........

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