Kolkata, 18 November (IANS). A four-member central team of the Election Commission of India (ECI) is coming to Kolkata on Tuesday. This team will go on a four-day visit to review the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state. It started from 4 November.
This is the second visit of the Central ECI team to West Bengal this month to review the revision process. The four members of the team include Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, two principal secretaries of ECI, S.B. Joshi and Malay Malik and Deputy Secretary Abhinav Aggarwal.
The central team will reach Kolkata on Tuesday and will remain in the state till November 21. During the current visit, the team will review SIR progress in Kolkata, South 24 Parganas, Nadia, Murshidabad and Malda.
On its last visit earlier this month, the Central ECI team had reviewed the progress of SIR in three districts of North Bengal.
The first stage of the three-stage SIR in West Bengal started on November 4. Sources have said that the work of distributing counting forms among voters has almost been completed.
According to the latest information received from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, the process of digitization of counting forms collected by Booth-Level Officers (BLOs) has already started and digitization of more than one crore counting forms has been completed.
As of October 27, the total number of voters in West Bengal as per the electoral roll is 7,66,37,529. The entire process is expected to be completed by March next year. The last time SIR was conducted in West Bengal was in 2002.
Voters whose names or their parents’ names were in the voter list of 2002 will automatically be considered valid voters in the SIR process. At the same time, voters whose names or their parents’ names were not in the voter list of 2002 will have to submit any of the 11 documents specified by the ECI to keep their names in the voter roll.
–IANS
SCH/AS