EC’s first suppl list on Mon, tribunals set up for appeals
Times of India | 21 March 2026
Kolkata: The first supplementary voters' list for Bengal, containing names cleared by judicial officers, will be published on Monday evening, a senior Election Commission official said on Friday evening. The second list will be published next Friday and the third on April 3.
EC had earlier indicated that the fist supplementary list would be published by Saturday, but law and order concerns raised by a section of the bureaucracy and the police administration appointed by the poll panel itself might have prompted a rethink.
Ahead of the publication of the supplementary lists, the poll panel on Friday, acting on a recommendation of the Calcutta High Court chief justice, issued a notification on the constitution of 19 tribunals to hear appeals from individuals under judicial scrutiny who will be left out of the supplementary lists. The tribunals will be headed by former high court judges, including ex-chief justice of Calcutta High Court TS Sivagnanam.
EC said appeals can be filed online — through the ECI NET platform at: https:ecinet.eci.gov.in — or at the offices of the district magistrates, sub-divisional magistrates and sub-divisional officers.
Former chief justice Sivagnanam will hear appeals from Kolkata and parts of North 24 Parganas.
Two other former Calcutta HC judges — Biswajit Basu and Indrajit Chatterjee — will head the Murshidabad tribunals. Retired judges Siddhartha Roy Chowdhury and Ranjit Kumar Bag will head the tribunals for Malda and South 24 Parganas, respectively.
Around 60 lakh names in the "under adjudication" category on Bengal's final voters' list, published on Feb 28, were sent to judicial officers for scrutiny. The supplementary lists will contain names cleared by the judicial officers.
A senior EC official said around 27.2 lakh of those cases, spread across 80,681 polling booths, were disposed of till Friday.
"Until now, supplementary names have been added to the electoral lists of around 40,000 polling booths. Work is on for the remaining booths. The complete list containing supplementary names from all 80,681 booths will be uploaded once Calcutta High Court sends it to the commission. The uploading may take at least six hours," the official said.
Sources said senior bureaucrats and top police officers in the state expressed concerns over the timing of the release of the first list during Eid and Navratri, citing potential law and order issues. Judicial officers, too, fear that releasing the list during the festival period could expose them to threats.
"In a meeting chaired by the chief justice of Calcutta High Court on Thursday morning, home secretary Sanghamitra Ghosh, director-general of police SN Gupta and Kolkata Police commissioner Ajay Nand raised security concerns over the plan to publish the first supplementary list on Friday or Saturday. They referred to the disturbances that broke out in parts of Bengal following the passage of a bill in Parliament last year," said a source privy to the discussions.
The officials requested that the first list be released after the festivals are over, the source said.
In the afternoon, the Calcutta HC chief justice conveyed the concerns raised by the state administration to Bengal chief electoral officer Manoj Agarwal and special roll observer Subrata Gupta.
In the evening, Agarwal and other EC officials held a meeting with chief secretary Dushyant Nariala, the home secretary, DGP and the Kolkata Police commissioner. Sources said Nariala requested Agarwal to publish the list after March 26, citing potential law and order concerns.
EC had said electoral lists could be updated till the last date of filing of nomination papers. For the first phase of the assembly elections, to be held on April 23, the deadline for filing nomination is April 6.