Supreme Court sceptical about binding SIR Tribunals to timeline; seeks disposal details

: The Supreme Court of India on Tuesday (August 11, 2026) hesitated to bind Appellate Tribunals, hearing applications filed by persons excluded from the West Bengal electoral roll in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, to a specific timeline even as it sought details of their disposal rates from the Election Commission of India. 

A Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant was hearing a petition filed by Congress leader Adhur Ranjan Chowdhury to streamline and expedite the appellate process and disposal.

The court ordered the Election Commission of India to produce the on-record details of the disposal rate of the Tribunals. The Bench listed the case for further hearing on August 25.

Senior advocate Rauf Rahim, for Mr. Chowdhury, linked the exclusion from the voter list to the denial of essential welfare measures like ration cards in West Bengal. He submitted that the appellate process must be made time-bound.

The court however said it would step in to correct delays caused by logistical and infrastructural reasons.

“If performance appears lacking in terms of the volume [of cases] and time taken, then there is a need to revisit and restructure the architecture of disposal…” Justice Joymalya Bagchi, present on the three-judge Bench, remarked.

In July, the Supreme Court had taken up a similar petition filed by Prasenjit Bose, chairperson of the SIR Committee, West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, flagging that the deletion from the West Bengal electoral roll during the SIR has led to serious civil consequences extending beyond the right to vote.

Lists of folly: On the Supreme Court, the SIR and benefits

Mr. Bose had referred to a notification issued by the new BJP government on May 19 that excluded voters who must not remain beneficiaries of the Annapurna Yojana scheme for cash transfer to women unless they had filed appeals before the SIR Tribunal. On June 4, the State had directed the deletion of beneficiaries under the Public Distribution System (PDS) on the basis of the outcome of the SIR. Again, on May 14, the State government had issued an order calling for authorities to re-verify and cancel caste certificates of names deleted from the SIR list.

The petition had argued that the impact of these notifications was made worse by the snail’s pace of the Appellate Tribunals. Mr. Bose’s petition had contended that only 38,000 appeals were disposed of out of a total 34 lakh filed in West Bengal. Out of the 38000 appeals, 70% were cleared for re-inclusion in the electoral roll.