KOLKATA: Sixty-seven-year-old Aniruddha Ghosh Majumdar stood in a slow-moving queue, not for himself, but for his two daughters, aged 27 and 22. Both had received notices from the Election Commission (EC) citing
“logical discrepancy”.
The issue was a spelling mismatch in Majumdar’s name between the 2002 West Bengal voter list and the present records. One daughter rushed straight from the office to attend the SIR hearing at a Salt Lake school on Tuesday, while the other slipped out of university between classes. Despite suffering from asthma, Majumdar accompanied them. Asked why, he smiled and said: “All documents were submitted earlier. Still the notice came. So I have come in person to show the officials that I am still alive.”
Across Bengal, SIR has become a daily ordeal. Elderly citizens wait in endless queues. New mothers stand with babies in their arms. For many, the process is now
affecting livelihoods.
IT professional Soumik Bandopadhyay reached office unusually early on Tuesday, hoping his superior would allow him to leave in time for his SIR hearing in Salt Lake.
Arijit Acharya, a real estate consultant from Dankuni in Hooghly, took a day’s leave to attend his hearing in Chanditala. “We arrived at 10 am and returned around 4.30 pm. My father, a senior citizen, came with me. At one point, a fight broke out due to pushing. The crowd was huge, and many senior citizens stood in the queue, skipping lunch. There were only a few officials at the booth,” he said.
Thirty-two-year-old IT expert Anirban Ghoshal was called because his father’s middle name appears as ‘Kr’ instead of ‘Kumar’ in the 2002 voter list. “Standing in the queue isn’t the problem. It’s the harassment and the rush. We were told that if a parent’s name is in the 2002 list, children need not worry. But reality is different. They say AI is being used but AI won’t be able to do the work properly if the prompts are not right. Most BLOs aren’t tech-savvy. Officials should have been trained before rolling out SIR,” he said.
Retired central government employee Bijoy Bhattacharya raised similar concerns after attending his daughter’s hearing in Chanditala. “Documents are being stapled hastily, risking mix-ups. Photos got deleted and the voters were recalled. We don’t oppose SIR. But this should have begun in 2025, not just before polls,” he said.