Over 3L ‘No-Mapping’ voters skip SIR hearings in Bengal
The Statesman | 25 January 2026
More than three lakh ‘no-mapping’ voters did not appear for hearings under the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal, despite being served notices by the Election Commission of India.
According to commission sources, notices specifying dates and venues were issued to nearly 32 lakh ‘no-mapping’ voters.
As the hearing process is now nearing completion, data shows that around 10 per cent of them failed to turn up.
This translates to nearly 3.2 lakh voters who remained absent from the hearings.
At the time of publishing the draft electoral rolls, the commission had stated that West Bengal had 31,68,426 ‘no-mapping’ voters-electors who could not establish a linkage with the last SIR conducted in 2002.
All of them were called for hearings in the first phase. However, by the final stage of the hearings, around 10 per cent did not respond.
Apart from ‘no-mapping’ cases, voters with logical discrepancies in their records have also been summoned for hearings.
7 February has been fixed as the last day of hearings under the SIR, while the final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on 14 February.
The commission, however, has indicated that the deadline may be extended, as the hearing process is still ongoing.
Officials said that ‘no-mapping’ voters will still be given an opportunity to participate, failing which their names will be removed from the final list as per rules.
Recently, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to publish the list of voters with logical discrepancies.
The commission has said that this list, along with the list of ‘no-mapping’ voters, will be published on Saturday. In total, around 1.26 crore names are expected to feature in the combined lists.
The draft electoral roll was published on 16 December, following which more than 58 lakh names were excluded.
If the nearly three lakh ‘no-mapping’ voters who skipped hearings are also deleted, the total number of deletions could rise to around 61 lakh.