Top News

Kolkata: With less than a month left for both completion of the hearings on claims and objections to the draft voters’ list in West Bengal as well as the publication of the final voters’ list, the Election Commission of India (ECI), has now set a target to complete 7,00,000 hearings a day through 6,500 hearing centres scattered all over the state.

The Commission is of the view that this is neither an unachievable target nor a herculean task, considering that the electoral officers in each hearing centre will have to handle around 107 hearing cases a day, roughly, said sources in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal.

The deadline for hearings to claims and objections on the draft voters’ list is February 7, following which the final voters’ list will be published on February 14.

Shortly after the publication of the final voters’ list, the ECI is expected to announce the polling dates for the crucial Assembly elections in the state later this year.

Recently, the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, interacting with the media persons in Kolkata, said that the polling and counting will be over by the end of April.

The process of hearing the “unmapped” voters, which is currently underway, is almost complete, and by next week, the “logical discrepancy” cases will be heard.

Unmapped voters are those who were unable to establish any link either through “self-mapping” or through “progeny-mapping” with the voters’ list for 2002, the last time when the voters’ list revision exercise was conducted in West Bengal.

On the other hand, “logical discrepancy” cases relate to those voters in whose cases weird family-tree data had been detected in the course of “progeny mapping”.

Already, the Commission had directed that there would be a two-stage verification and authentication of supporting identity documents to be furnished by the voters summoned for hearing.

Electoral registration officers (EROs) will conduct the first stage of verification and authentication, and District Magistrates, who are also District Electoral Officers, will conduct the second stage of verification.

The Commission had already made it clear that domicile certificates issued by the state government and admit cards of Madhyamik, the secondary examination conducted by the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, will not be considered authentic identity-proof documents.