Special Intensive Revision process for Darjeeling district nearing completion

DARJEELING,: Darjeeling district administration today informed that Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process for the district is nearing completion and the final electoral roll will be published by February 14 following after necessary rectifications.

Darjeeling Additional District Magistrate (General) Sumit Kumar Rai said, “We are presently in completing the process of SIR with us having given a deadline to complete the hearing phase of it by February 5. The hearing process of 90 to 95% has been completed so far with us to complete the hearing of the entire number of cases by this Wednesday.”

He maintained that in Darjeeling district, which comprises five Assembly constituencies, the majority of the cases fell into two types which were unmapped cases i.e. the voter could not match his data with the 2002 electoral roll with the second type being cases with logical discrepancies in which the system was showing a mismatch of names. He said that logical discrepancy cases did not take much time to sort out. He claimed that in the entire district, there were a total of about 2,80,000 cases to 2,84,000 such cases.

“Apart from hearing of the different cases we are also parallelly engaged in disposal of such cases in which data is being entered in portals after the documents have been presented by the electors who appeared in the hearings. This will also be completed within five days or so after which the electoral roll will be published,” he said.

Rai maintained that the greatest challenge seen in the Hills here were cases whose names were being shown in the 2002 electoral roll but not being shown in the system for which they had also written to the Chief Electoral Officer with the Election Commission also directing them not to conduct the hearings strictly.

“The other major problems seen were in the tea garden areas where the voters there did not have the documents asked for by the notification while filling the SIR forms. We also wrote to the Election Commission regarding it and they were also given some levy and their problems solved,” he said.

The ADM maintained that about 10 per cent of voters' names had been deleted in the entire SIR process in Darjeeling district as they were not genuine voters. He said that those who were genuine voters would be there in the electoral roll that would be published after the hearing process was over. He said that by February 14 the final electoral roll would be published.