New Delhi: More than 7.04 crore electors in West Bengal have found a place in the final electoral roll published by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The exercise saw deletion of 61.78 lakh voters, amounting to an 8.06 percent decrease in voter roll. Before the publication of draft rolls, the State had a total of 7.6 crore voters.
The draft roll for the State, as published on 16 December 2025, had 7.08 crore electors.
After the publication of the draft roll, 1.8 lakh voters were added through Form-6 (Form for inclusion) and Form 6A (Form for inclusion of overseas electors). Another 6,671 voters were added through Form 8 (for electors who shifted from other states for inclusion/shifting within the state).
A total of 5.46 lakh voters were deleted through Form-7 (form for deletion).
The final voter list has 3,60,22,642 male voters, 3,44,35,260 female voters and 1,382 voters of the third gender.
The exercise has been contentious in the state, with the SIR also being challenged in the Supreme Court. In a hearing last week, the top court permitted the Calcutta High Court chief justice to deploy civil judges and also requisition judicial officers from neighbouring Jharkhand and Odisha to deal with 80 lakh claims and objections. This was after the Supreme Court took an “extraordinary” decision to involve the judiciary in the SIR exercise, noting that the “trust deficit” between the Mamata Banerjee-led government and the ECI had led to a “stalemate”, with time running out.
More than 1.36 crore voters had been flagged in the state for “logical discrepancies”. This included instances of electors with an “unusually high number of children”, even some with more than 100 children, and those with an age gap of less than 15 years with their parents
After completion of the SIR in poll-bound Bihar, the ECI had in October last year announced its next phase of SIR in 12 states and Union Territories. The list included West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry—three states/UTs where assembly polls are due this year.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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