Discuss the constitutional and administrative challenges posed by the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, with reference to the recent backlog of appeals in West Bengal.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is the Election Commission's door-to-door re-verification of electoral rolls under its Article 324 mandate, begun in Bihar (2025) [1] and extended to West Bengal and other States in Phase-II [2]. The West Bengal appeals backlog shows that the pursuit of purity of the roll is outrunning the machinery meant to protect inclusiveness.

Constitutional challenges

• Autonomy versus supervision: the 19 Appellate Tribunals headed by retired High Court judges were constituted following the Supreme Court's order and the Calcutta High Court Chief Justice's recommendation [3], raising the question of how far court-designed machinery can substitute for the ECI's own superintendence under Article 324.
• Right to vote: an appeal does not suspend the registration officer's order. With 37,18,452 of 38,20,683 appeals undecided [4], lakhs face the municipal polls with disputed status; a vote lost in that election cannot be restored later.
• Due process: the Court had to separately direct that tribunals be given the "recorded reasons" for each exclusion — indicating that the burden of justifying deletion was not being discharged as a matter of course.

Administrative challenges

• Capacity mismatch: roughly two lakh appeals per bench, with only 1,02,231 (under 3%) disposed in about six months [4] — at that rate the backlog outlasts several election cycles.
• Over-centralisation: Section 24, RP Act 1950 already provides a district-level appeal to the District Magistrate and then the Chief Electoral Officer [5], spreading work across districts; funnelling all appeals into 19 benches traded throughput for independence.
• Transparency deficit: pendency data emerged only through an RTI reply and a court-mandated affidavit [4], not routine disclosure by a body that publishes polling data in near real time.

SIR's objective is legitimate, but legitimacy rests on process. Publishing tribunal-wise disposal dashboards, activating the statutory Section 24 route for routine corrections, and fixing outer timelines linked to poll dates would align the exercise with its constitutional promise — that no eligible citizen is left out.