Evaluate the role of judicial oversight in ensuring procedural fairness in ECI's roll-revision exercises.

The Election Commission's power to order an intensive revision of electoral rolls flows from Article 324 and Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 [1]. Judicial oversight has not displaced this power, but it has increasingly shaped how it is exercised — making the courts a corrective, though not a substitute, for fair procedure.

Where judicial oversight has strengthened fairness

• Procedural safeguards read into the process: hearing petitions on the West Bengal Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Supreme Court allowed the exercise to continue but extended the document-scrutiny window by a week, protecting electors facing tight deadlines [2].
• Institutionalising remedies: acting on the Court's order of 10 March 2026, the ECI constituted 19 Appellate Tribunals in West Bengal, headed by former High Court judges including ex-Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, to decide inclusion-exclusion appeals [3].
• Judicial personnel in verification: involving serving and former judges in scrutiny inserted an independent check into what was purely an administrative determination [3].
• Legitimising, not obstructing: by upholding the ECI's revision power while regulating its method, courts have balanced roll purity against the elector's stake in Article 326 adult suffrage.

Limits of judicial oversight

• Reactive and post-facto: relief arrives only after deletion, whereas Bihar's SIR corrected omissions within the claims-and-objections window through Form 6 before the final roll was published [4].
• Capacity mismatch: a handful of tribunals cannot clear lakhs of appeals before polling day; a remedy decided after the vote is no remedy.
• No substitute for transparency: courts cannot publish the criteria behind "logical discrepancy" flagging — only the ECI can, and its own stated commitment is to conduct SIR in phases with safeguards for eligible voters [5].

Judicial oversight has therefore been decisive in supplying due process that administrative design omitted, but it remains a second line of defence. With SIR Phase-II already underway in nine States and three UTs [6], the durable fix lies in the ECI internalising these safeguards — published criteria, retention of names until appeals are decided, and correction before finalisation — so that free and fair elections rest on institutional design rather than litigation.