Critically evaluate whether ad hoc tribunal mechanisms are an adequate institutional response to disputes arising from large-scale electoral roll revisions.

Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls turns routine verification into mass adjudication. West Bengal's answer was 19 ad hoc Appellate Tribunals of retired High Court judges, constituted by the ECI on the Supreme Court's 10 March 2026 order [1]. The design is fair; the capacity is not.

Where the mechanism works

• Independence from the roll-maker: benches led by former High Court judges, one by former Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, sit outside the district administration whose officers ordered the deletions [1].
• Due process: the Court required all applications, documents and information, online and offline, to be placed before the tribunals, so exclusion is tested on the record rather than presumed [2].
• Continuous judicial supervision: the Court fixed outer dates, directing the ECI to resolve the voter-list issue before 6 April 2026 [3] — a discipline no departmental forum imposes on itself.
• Uniformity: one adjudicatory standard across 24 districts.

Where it falls short

• Volume mismatch: 38,20,683 appeals before 19 benches — roughly two lakh each; only 1,02,231 stand disposed, leaving 37,18,452 (~97%) pending about six months after constitution [4].
• Delay is denial: an undecided appeal leaves the registration officer's order operative, so lakhs approach municipal polls with the very status they contested [4].
• Statutory route sidelined: Section 24, RPA 1950 already provides appeal to a District Magistrate-rank officer and then the Chief Electoral Officer [5], spreading the load across districts instead of funnelling it into 19 benches.
• Opacity: pendency data surfaced only through an RTI reply and a court-ordered affidavit [4].
• Ad hocism: raised per crisis and wound up after, leaving no permanent capacity.

Such tribunals therefore secure fairness of process but not timeliness of remedy — and for a voter the two are inseparable. A tiered design, routing documentary and clerical appeals to Section 24 officers while tribunals decide contested exclusions, backed by a public disposal dashboard and deadlines tied to the poll date, would make the response adequate. Free and fair elections under Article 324 require a remedy that arrives before polling day.