Tribunalisation of electoral dispute resolution: assess its efficacy using the example of West Bengal's SIR appellate tribunals.

Tribunalisation refers to shifting adjudication from regular courts to specialised bodies. In West Bengal's Special Intensive Revision (SIR), where over 60 lakh names were scrutinised and nearly 27 lakh marked ineligible [2], the Supreme Court's response was to route disputes through 19 appellate tribunals headed by retired High Court judges [1] — an experiment whose promise is real but whose delivery remains uneven.

Merits: why tribunalisation suited the SIR

• Scale: mass exclusion generates lakhs of individual claims; ordinary writ jurisdiction cannot absorb this volume, and the Court accordingly declined individual pleas and directed petitioners to the tribunals [4].
• Expertise with independence: panels headed by retired judges, including a former Calcutta High Court Chief Justice, insulate roll revision from the ECI's own administrative hierarchy [1].
• Accessibility: 19 tribunals spread across 23 districts bring remedy closer to the poor and migrant voters most likely to be excluded [1].
• Procedural fairness: appeals supplement the ECI's own claims-and-objections safeguards during SIR [5], reinforcing due process before deletion.

Limitations exposed

• Capacity bottleneck: with roughly 30–34 lakh appeals pending, each tribunal carries over a lakh cases — disposal lags far behind filing [3].
• Time-sensitivity: an electoral remedy delayed past polling day is a remedy denied; with municipal elections imminent, pendency itself disenfranchises [3].
• Transparency deficit: the Court found available data on inclusion- versus exclusion-related appeals sparse, weakening public scrutiny [3].
• Institutional question: continuing judicial supervision of a body empowered under Article 324 blurs the line between review and administration.

On balance, tribunalisation was a necessary and largely sound institutional choice — it converted an unmanageable constitutional flood into a structured remedy — but its efficacy depends entirely on speed and data transparency. Time-bound disposal, additional benches where pendency demands, prioritising excluded voters' appeals, and publication of standardised disposal data would make it genuinely effective, securing the franchise that gives representative democracy its meaning.