With the Election Commission all set to start the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral roll in poll-bound West Bengal, the state unit of the Congress on Thursday asked the poll panel to convene an all-party meeting at the national level to review the experience of the SIR process in Bihar.

In a deputation submitted to the state Chief Electoral Officer, the party asked the EC to convene the meeting at the earliest, before notifying the SIR schedule in the state.

The party also said the ‘matching-mapping’ process (comparing the voters list of 2002 when the SIR was last held in the state with that of 2025) should be completed first and its results “be disclosed in a transparent manner”.

The deputation was submitted by state Congress president Subhankar Sarkar, Prasenjit Bose, the chairperson of the state Congress Committee to Safeguard the Right to Vote & Citizenship, and other leaders.

“The EC should also conduct software-based demographic de-duplication and prepare a list of Demographically Similar Entries. Duplicate or multiple enrollments should be deleted only after due verification in the enumeration phase,” the party said.

It said the EC should also collect data on registered deaths from the Registrar of Births and Deaths and link them with the base electoral roll to identify and enlist possibly dead electors.

Similarly, specific guidelines need to be framed for ascertaining an elector as “permanently shifted”, especially for married women and other migrants.

“The deletion of names of permanently relocated migrants should be mandatorily accompanied by re-enrollment in their current place of residence,” it added.

The party also asked the EC to discontinue the “convoluted exercise” of deleting the names of existing electors for non-submission of enumeration forms within 30 days and then requiring them to fill Form 6 for re-enrollment as a new elector within the next 30 days. “This is a significant flaw in the existing SIR 2025 process,” the party added.