Kolkata: The state government has asked the district administration to be very cautious with the exercise of deletion and correction of names in the voters' list which is going on in full swing in different districts of the state.
The Election Commission has started the process of roll revision from December 16 this year, and it will continue till January 15, 2020.
A senior official at Nabanna said that Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha has asked all the District Magistrates (DMs) who are also the 'Returning Officer' of the district to ensure that names of genuine voters are not struck off from the electoral roll.
"There has been instances when the commission has deleted the name of a voter who had to run from pillar to post to include his or her name. Any removal of name might lead to confusion among a person that he is being denied citizenship rights with so much talks over National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)
going on. Such happenings may lead to law and order problem which the state government do not want," a senior state government official said.
It may be mentioned that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday had appealed to the common people to ensure that their names figure properly in the voter list with the voter list verification exercise going in the state. "They (Centre) is intentionally erring in voters' list preparation. The exercise is on till January 15, 2020, so visit your nearby camp and check that your name is in the voter list," Banerjee had said.
According to election commission data Bengal has been a state where there has been minimum number of names being deleted from the voters list.
Bengal has had around 4 lakhs names omitted from the voters' list in 2018 against Maharashtra's 17 lakhs .
However, in the year 2015, Bengal had 8,38,856 names deleted from the voters' list which was higher than the average omissions that hovered in and around 3 to 5 lakh since 2011. In 2010, the figure was 645,455.