Kolkata, Feb 22 : The full-fledged judicial adjudication of claims and objections arising from the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in poll-bound West Bengal will start from Monday, and the process will begin with the involvement of 150 session judges appointed by the Calcutta High Court.
A total of 250 judicial officers have been involved in the system, and the process of judicial adjudication will be overseen at the district level by a Calcutta High Court-appointed three-member committee in each district.
The process will start on Monday, with 150 session judges, and the rest will be involved in the process as per requirements.
Each such supervising committee will be constituted of one district judge, the district magistrate, who is also the district electoral officer, and the district police officer concerned.
“The focus will be to complete the process of the verification of cases categorised as ‘logical discrepancy’ cases that have been referred for corroboration by the judicial officers on or before February 28,” said an insider from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal.
As of now, it has been decided that the final voters’ list in West Bengal will be published as per schedule on February 28, minus those voters’ documents that would be referred to the judicial officials for adjudication, and supplementary lists would be published later accordingly.
An emergency meeting at the Jeshop Bhavan in North Kolkata with judges and representatives of the Election Commission started on Sunday at 11.30 a.m., where the outline of the hearing procedure, verification of documents, and settlement within the time frame will be finalised.
At the time the report was filed, the meeting was on, and it is likely to continue for some time. The briefing and training of the judicial officers engaged in the process will be completed by Sunday night, so that the full-fledged judicial adjudication of the voters’ documents can start from Monday.
As of now, it has been estimated that the judicial adjudication will be for around 45 lakh to 50 lakh voters’ documents, all of which were categorised as “logical discrepancy” cases, including the ones with weird family data detected during the course of “progeny mapping”.
–IANS
