Three weeks into West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Election Commission of India is preparing for one of the state’s largest voter-roll clean-ups in over two decades.
Preliminary data indicates that at least 10 lakh names, reflecting years of accumulated irregularities, are likely to be deleted once the exercise is completed.
Sources within the Commission reveal that around 6.5 lakh deletions involve voters confirmed dead, while the remaining 3.5 lakh names fall under categories of duplicates, shifted voters, and those who could not be traced despite repeated verification.
A significant portion of these questionable entries is concentrated in the border districts of North and South Dinajpur, long identified as zones with disproportionately high voter growth. The preliminary findings appear to confirm the Commission’s earlier mapping, which showed the highest spikes in voter enrolment in districts adjoining Bangladesh.
“Between 2002, when the last SIR was conducted, and 2025, West Bengal has witnessed a staggering 66 per cent rise in registered voters, from 4.58 crore to 7.63 crore,” a senior official at the CEO’s office told UNI on condition of anonymity. “What is striking is that nine out of the top 10 districts with the sharpest increase lie along the Indo-Bangladesh border,” the official said.
The nine border districts that have recorded the steepest jumps are Uttar Dinajpur (105.49 per cent), Malda (94.58 per cent), Murshidabad (87.65 per cent), South 24 Parganas (83.30 per cent), Jalpaiguri (82.30 per cent), Cooch Behar (76.52 per cent), North 24-Parganas (72.18 per cent), Nadia (71.46 per cent) and Dakshin Dinajpur (70.94 per cent). Birbhum, with a 73.44 per cent rise, is the only non-border district in the top tier. The official described the surge as “impossible to justify through natural population growth alone.”
The abnormal spike has drawn heightened scrutiny from the Election Commission of India, which noted that West Bengal’s voter growth far exceeds that of other major states over the same period. Comparative data shows Uttar Pradesh’s voter count increased by 39.1 per cent, Madhya Pradesh by 47.2 per cent, Maharashtra by 44.8 per cent, Karnataka by 28.7 per cent, Tamil Nadu by 18.8 per cent, Bihar by 50.3 per cent, and Gujarat by 42.2 per cent.
Bengal’s rise of 65.8 per cent is unmatched, prompting the Commission to flag the state as an outlier in the country’s electoral landscape. “A logical growth in this period should have been around 48 to 50 per cent. Bengal’s numbers are far beyond that threshold. Naturally, this will attract the Commission’s attention,” another senior official remarked, noting that the current revision is already throwing up discrepancies on a large scale.
In absolute numbers, Bengal has expanded from 4.58 crore voters in 2002 to 7.60 crore in 2024, a leap that officials argue cannot be attributed merely to demographic factors. According to election authorities, part of the problem stems from years of inadequate deletions during routine revisions. Booth-level officers (BLOs), they say, often failed to strike off the names of the deceased or those who migrated out of their constituencies.
The last intensive revision in 2002 removed over 28 lakh names, and officials expect the current exercise to yield a similar, if not higher, number of deletions. A major push came from a recent review meeting with UIDAI, where Aadhaar authorities identified nearly 47 lakh deceased individuals in the state. Of these, 34 lakh deceased Aadhaar cardholders and 13 lakh non-Aadhaar deceased have been shared with election authorities.
As the SIR continues, the election commission’s data teams are still digitising millions of forms and conducting field verification. For now, however, the early trends point toward a sweeping clean-up of the voter rolls — one that could significantly reshape the electoral profile of several districts ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections.