Parallel administrative and quasi-judicial remedies can produce unequal outcomes for similarly placed citizens. Discuss with reference to electoral re-enrolment in West Bengal.

Article 326 guarantees adult suffrage, but that right only works if a person's name is on the electoral roll. After the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the ECI's door-to-door Form 6 re-enrolment drive leaves out more than 20 lakh West Bengal voters whose cases are pending before Appellate Tribunals [1]. People who lost their names in the same way now get justice at two different speeds.

Two routes, unequal outcomes

• Administrative route: the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) must clear Form 6 claims within one month [1].
• Quasi-judicial route: 22.21 lakh appeals are pending before only 19 tribunals [1][3]. That is more than one lakh per bench. Only about 83,000 of 38.1 lakh appeals had been decided by August 2026 [4].
• Penalty for diligence: the voter who used the legal remedy waits longest, while someone who did nothing can re-enrol within a month [1].
• Electoral cost: under the RP Act, 1950, no name can be added after the last date for nominations. A voter who wins an appeal late can still lose the vote.
• Equity: the delay hurts migrants, the poor and people with weak documents most.

Why keeping the routes separate is defensible

• Judicial primacy: the Supreme Court ruled that judicial officers' decisions cannot be examined by administrative officers [2]. If EROs could accept Form 6 from these voters, an executive officer would in effect overrule a judicial finding.
• Avoiding conflict: running both tracks at once risks contradictory outcomes and forum shopping.
• Mixed caseload: only about 7 lakh appeals come from voters who were deleted. Most of the rest challenge other people's inclusion [4], so not every appellant has lost the vote.

Way forward

• Time-bound disposal: set a fixed outer deadline for deciding appeals, much as Assam's NRC set a 120-day limit for filing them [5].
• More benches: the Supreme Court has asked for category-wise pendency data and whether more tribunals are needed [4].
• Prioritise deletion appeals, because exclusion amounts to "denuding a voting right" [4].
• Clear rules on whether an appellant can withdraw an appeal and file Form 6 instead, and regular tribunal-wise data on pending and decided cases.
• No presumption of non-citizenship from a deletion, following MHA's NRC clarification [5].

Keeping the routes separate protects the finality of judicial decisions, but if that finality comes too late, the voter is disenfranchised anyway. One fast, transparent track with enough benches, which hears excluded voters first, would balance an accurate roll with the equality promised by Articles 14 and 326 and with SDG 16.7 on inclusive decision-making.