KOLKATA: Digitisation of the 2002 SIR database using AI tools has resulted in large-scale mismatches, with several genuine voters categorised as “logical discrepancies”, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee told Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar in a letter on Monday.
“In the absence of any digitised database of the last SIR, the manual voters list of 2002 – including those published in vernacular scripts – was scanned and translated into English using AI tools for digitisation. During this transliteration, serious errors occurred in the electors’ particulars. These errors have resulted in large-scale data mismatches, leading to many genuine voters being categorised as logical discrepancies,” Banerjee said in her letter to the CEC on Monday.
Banerjee accused EC of disregarding its own statutory processes followed over the last two decades, complaining that electors were being compelled to re-establish identity despite earlier corrections made after “quasi-judicial hearings”.
“Such an approach, disowning its own actions and mechanisms spanning more than two decades, is arbitrary, illogical and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution of India,” she said, stressing that the SIR procedure was “funamentaly flawed”.
She said that during the hearing, poll panel officials did not issue any acknowledgement receipt to voters who submitted the required documents. “Subsequently at the stage of verification, these documents are being reported as ‘not found’ or ‘not available on record’ and on that basis names of electors are being deleted from electoral rolls,” she said.
The SIR hearing process had become “largely mechanical, driven purely by technical data”, and was “completely devoid of the application of mind, sensitivity and human touch”, she added.
In her letter, Banerjee also cited cases involving the eminent poet Joy Goswami, Tollywood actor and TMC MP Deepak Adhikari, cricketer Mohammed Shami, and a monk of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, who have been served hearing notices.
Election Commission officials in Bengal said about 7 million people have been sent notices in connection with the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal so far and more notices were being generated. Of these, about 3.2 million voters were unmapped and the remaining 3.8 million had logical discrepancies in their enumeration forms.
The ruling TMC had earlier attacked the poll panel over the large number of voters with logical discrepancies in the state. On Saturday, Banerjee had written to the CEC after the poll panel sent a hearing notice to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
The SIR exercise, currently underway in 12 states and UTs, requires electors to be linked to the electoral roll last comprehensively updated in 2002. Where such linkage cannot be established through the elector’s own entry or that of a family member, the system categorises the entry as “unmapped” and generates a notice requiring further verification through documents or hearings.
Logical discrepancies were divided into seven categories – those who have been mapped with more than six persons in the progeny mapping, those whose age difference with their parents is less than 15 years; those at least 45 years of age but whose name was absent in the 2002 list; those who show a mismatch in their father’s names in the 2005 and 2002 lists; those whose age difference with grand-parents is less than 40 years; voters whose age gap with parents is more than 50 years and voters whose sex doesn’t match with the 2002 list.
