No receipts for SIR documents, Mamata writes fifth letter to CEC

Claiming that no proper acknowledgement or receipt is being issued for the documents submitted by electors during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday (January 12, 2026) wrote yet another letter to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar.

In the letter, the Chief Minister said voters who were being issued hearing notices were already mapped to the 2002 electoral rolls, either by themselves or through their progeny and that issuing such notices in these cases was therefore unnecessary.

This is the fifth letter written by the Chief Minister to the CEC since the SIR process began in West Bengal. In her previous letter, dated January 10, Ms. Banerjee had alleged that eminent citizens, including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, were being harassed during the SIR exercise.

In Monday’s (January 12, 2026) letter, the Chief Minister said the non-issuance of documentary acknowledgement during SIR hearings “deprives electors of proof of submission and places them at the mercy of internal record-keeping deficiencies”.

The Trinamool Congress chairperson alleged that the SIR process was mechanical and driven by technicalities rather than a reasoned application of mind. “Such administrative lapses are being unfairly forced upon citizens, causing severe harassment and resulting in the denial of their constitutional rights. This defeats the very objective of the Special Intensive Revision, which is intended to strengthen and purify the electoral rolls, not to exclude genuine and eligible voters,” she said.

After nearly 58 lakh names were struck off in the first phase of the SIR, about 1.36 crore voters have been issued notices under “logical discrepancies” in the second phase of the exercise.

The Chief Minister pointed out that many genuine voters were being wrongly categorised as “logical discrepancies.

“In the absence of a digitised database from the last SIR, the manual electoral rolls of 2002—including those published in vernacular scripts—were scanned and translated into English using Al tools. During this transliteration process, serious errors occurred in elector particulars such as name, age, sex, relationship and guardian’s name. These errors have resulted in large-scale data mismatches, leading to many genuine voters being categorised as “logical discrepancies,” the letter pointed out.

Meanwhile, a section of BLOs on Monday held protests outside the office of the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer, alleging that the EC had remained indifferent to the deaths of several BLOs during the ongoing SIR process. Members of the BLO Adhikar Raksha Committee claimed that BLOs across the State had been under “tremendous mental and physical pressure” ever since the revision exercise began, with the workload taking a serious toll on their health.

The agitating BLOs cited reports of multiple deaths of officers in different districts since the revision of electoral rolls started. Ms. Banerjee, in her letter to the CEC, also referred to the deaths of BLOs as well as ordinary citizens due to SIR.