Examine the role of the Supreme Court in ensuring transparency and accountability of the Election Commission of India during electoral roll revisions.

Article 324 vests superintendence of electoral rolls in the Election Commission of India (ECI), but the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar and West Bengal has shown that this autonomy needs an external check. The Supreme Court has emerged as that check — designing remedial machinery and compelling disclosure — though its role remains corrective rather than substitutive.

Designing accountability machinery

• On the Court's 10 March 2026 order, and on the Calcutta High Court Chief Justice's recommendation, the ECI constituted 19 Appellate Tribunals headed by retired High Court judges to hear inclusion/exclusion appeals [2].
• The Court further ordered a committee of three retired Chief Justices/Judges to monitor these tribunals, and insisted that every tribunal strictly follow prescribed procedure — converting administrative deletion into a reasoned, appealable act [4].

Compelling transparency

• Disposal data was withheld until a petitioner used an RTI reply and moved the Court, which directed the ECI to file an affidavit [1].
• The affidavit revealed that of 38,20,683 appeals, only 1,02,231 were disposed and 37,18,452 (~97%) remained pending across 24 districts — a fact that entered the public domain only through judicial compulsion [1].

Enforcing timelines

• The Court fixed an outer date, directing the ECI to resolve the West Bengal voter issue before 6 April 2026 [3], and linked tribunal outcomes to poll phases so successful appellants could vote [4]. Roughly 59 of 60 lakh claims and objections were cleared at the first stage [4].

Limits of judicial oversight

• Intervention is litigant-driven and episodic, not a standing disclosure regime.
• Concentrating lakhs of appeals in 19 benches ignores the wider statutory route under Section 24, RPA 1950, which allows district-level appeals to the Magistrate and then the Chief Electoral Officer [5].

The Court has thus functioned as guarantor of due process where the ECI's own disclosure fell short. The durable remedy lies in the ECI publishing tribunal-wise pendency data proactively and using the statutory appellate channel in parallel, so that transparency flows from institutional practice rather than litigation — reinforcing free and fair elections as part of the Constitution's basic structure.