The scale of appeals arising from the Special Intensive Revision exercise reveals gaps in India's electoral appellate infrastructure. Comment.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), conducted under Article 324 and the Representation of the People Act, 1950, is an administrative exercise with judicial consequences. West Bengal's 38.31 lakh appeals, of which 37.05 lakh remain pending [1], suggest India built an intensive revision machinery without a matching appellate one.

Scale has outrun adjudicatory capacity

• WB's SIR placed over 60 lakh names under scrutiny and marked nearly 27 lakh ineligible [3]; appeals followed on a scale no existing forum was designed for.
• The 19 appellate tribunals were constituted only on the Supreme Court's 10 March 2026 order, headed by retired judges including former Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam [2] — and had decided only about 1.26 lakh appeals by September 2026 [1].
• The demand is two-sided: 16.10 lakh appeals contest wrongful inclusion, the remainder exclusion [1]. Both roll purity and inclusiveness are stuck at the same bottleneck.

The gaps are in design, not merely in numbers

• Time limits bind only the citizen — 30 days to appeal to the Chief Electoral Officer, with delay condoned only at official discretion — while no outer limit binds the deciding authority [5].
• An appeal does not stay the registration officer's action [5]. The name stays deleted while the appeal waits, and since rolls are frozen before polling, delay becomes de facto disenfranchisement.
• Tribunals are ad hoc and EC-constituted, not a standing electoral appellate body, so capacity must be renegotiated in every State. Bihar's 65 lakh draft-roll deletions [4] were an early warning that went unheeded.

The issue is not the Commission's power to cleanse rolls, but the thinness of the remedy against error. Expanding tribunals to match the State's 42 parliamentary constituencies and permitting videoconference hearings, as the EC has proposed [1], must be paired with statutory disposal timelines and retention of an elector's name until appeal. Only then does Article 326's promise of universal adult franchise survive administrative revision.