Critically evaluate the Supreme Court's role in supervising the Election Commission's administrative functions.

Article 324 gives the Election Commission of India (ECI) superintendence, direction and control of electoral rolls and elections. But free and fair elections are part of the Constitution's basic structure, so the Supreme Court has often acted as the ECI's supervisor. The 2025–26 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) shows that this role has been essential, but also stretched beyond the Court's capacity.

Positive role: guardian of electoral integrity

• Institutional independence: in Anoop Baranwal (2023), the Court ruled that a committee of the PM, the Leader of Opposition and the CJI would advise on appointing Election Commissioners until Parliament passed a law [1].
• Protecting the right to vote (Article 326): in West Bengal's SIR, the Court asked serving and former District Judges to re-examine "logical discrepancy" claims [2].
• Neutral adjudication at scale: it set up Appellate Tribunals of former High Court judges. More than 500 Bengal judicial officers and 200 from Odisha and Jharkhand were deployed at the claims stage [3].
• Filling procedural gaps: it used Article 142 to give claims and objections to judicial officers, not to executive officers [4].

Limitations and concerns

• Separation of powers: tribunals created under Article 142 sit outside the statutory appeal route of the RP Act, 1950. This blurs the line between judicial review and running the elections itself.
• Supervision without control of delivery: more than 38 lakh cases were stuck in 19 tribunals because the ECI's ECINet portal required Aadhaar authentication to upload orders [5]. The planned shift to "e-sign" may still depend on Aadhaar e-KYC [6].
• Limited durability: the 2023 CEC Act replaced the CJI with a Cabinet Minister on the selection panel, which diluted the Baranwal safeguard [1].
• Episodic oversight: the Court acts only when petitions reach it. Help therefore often comes after voters have already been excluded.

Overall, judicial supervision has protected both the integrity of the rolls and the ECI's independence. However, it has relied on ad hoc structures and cannot fix problems in how the system works day to day. My verdict is that it is a necessary corrective, not a replacement for reform. The way forward is:

• a statutory, time-bound appeal process for disputes over the rolls;
• monthly public data from the ECI on how many cases have been decided;
• digital systems designed around the people who use them.

These reforms would let the Court go back to reviewing the ECI instead of managing it. That would better protect Articles 324 and 326 and the promise of universal adult suffrage.