Nearly all of the appeals filed against West Bengal's contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls remain unresolved, according to a disclosure by the Election Commission of India in an affidavit before the Supreme Court. Of 3.8 million appeals lodged by voters challenging inclusions or exclusions from the rolls, 3.7 million, or roughly 97 percent, are still pending. In response, the Commission has proposed setting up 42 election tribunals to clear the backlog, a plan now under the court's scrutiny.

The scale of the backlog raises urgent questions about whether millions of eligible voters in a state of more than 90 million people could find themselves effectively locked out of the electoral process if disputes are not resolved before the next round of voting. Bengal is due for assembly elections, and any large-scale disenfranchisement, intentional or bureaucratic, carries the potential to alter outcomes in a state where political contests have historically been decided by narrow margins.

A Backlog of Historic Proportions

The Special Intensive Revision process, meant to update and verify voter rolls, has instead produced an avalanche of grievances. Voters who believe they were wrongly excluded, or whose names were flagged for verification, have the right to appeal. But the sheer volume of appeals, nearly four million in a single state, has overwhelmed the existing machinery designed to adjudicate them.

Election disputes in India are typically handled by designated officers or tribunals at the district level, a system built for routine, isolated grievances rather than a flood of nearly simultaneous claims. The current backlog suggests that the infrastructure simply was not built to withstand a revision exercise of this magnitude, or that the exercise itself generated far more disputes than anticipated.

What 42 Tribunals Can Realistically Do

The Election Commission's proposed remedy, 42 new tribunals, is now before the Supreme Court, which is monitoring the SIR process closely. On paper, the number sounds substantial. In practice, dividing 3.7 million pending appeals across 42 bodies still leaves each tribunal with roughly 88,000 cases to resolve, an enormous caseload for any quasi-judicial body operating on the kind of compressed timeline that election schedules typically demand.

Legal experts and voting rights advocates have long warned that the mechanics of resolving individual voter disputes, verifying documents, hearing objections, and issuing rulings do not scale easily. Even with dedicated tribunals, questions remain about staffing, the pace of hearings, and whether appellants, many of whom may be poor, rural, or unfamiliar with legal procedure, will have meaningful access to make their case before any looming election deadline.

The core tension is between the constitutional mandate to hold timely elections and the equally fundamental right of every eligible citizen to vote. A tribunal system announced under pressure, with a caseload this large, tests both.

Why the Numbers Matter

India's electoral rolls are the foundation of its democratic exercise, and disputes over their accuracy are not new. But the ratio revealed in this affidavit, with 97 percent of appeals still pending, is unusual even by the standards of a system accustomed to procedural delay. It suggests that whatever mechanism existed to process appeals before the crisis was either severely under-resourced or caught entirely off guard by the scale of the revision's fallout.

For the millions of individual voters awaiting a ruling, the stakes are personal and immediate: an unresolved appeal can mean a citizen is unable to cast a ballot, regardless of how legitimate their underlying claim may be. Voting rights groups have historically flagged that revision exercises, however well-intentioned, carry a real risk of erroneous exclusions, particularly among migrant workers, the poor, and those without easy access to paperwork.

The Supreme Court's Role

The matter now rests with the Supreme Court, which has taken an active interest in how the Election Commission manages the SIR process in Bengal. The court's scrutiny signals that the judiciary views the backlog as more than an administrative footnote; it is a potential threat to the integrity of the franchise itself. How the court responds, whether by pressing the Commission for a faster timeline, demanding interim protections for voters with pending appeals, or requiring more tribunals still, will likely set a precedent for how India manages electoral roll disputes in other states undergoing similar revisions.

What remains clear is that the proposed fix, however well-intentioned, must be measured against the ticking clock of an approaching election. A tribunal system announced amid public and judicial pressure risks becoming a symbolic gesture unless it is matched with the staffing, funding, and procedural speed necessary to give millions of Bengal's voters a genuine hearing before it is too late.