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NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought the Election Commission’s response to petitions filed by political parties and politicians from ruling dispensations in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Puducherry opposing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls of their states as part of the pan-India exercise. After hearing senior advocate Kapil Sibal for petitioners from DMK and TMC, a bench of CJI-designate Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi wondered as to why the petitioners were opposed to correction of electoral rolls and said they can make suggestions to improve SIR. “You all should endeavour to make the SIR exercise reach every voter,” it said. However, when Sibal pressed for a stay on the ongoing SIR, it asked Election Commission to respond to the interim stay sought by the petitioners by Nov 24 and posted the matters for hearing on November 26. Sibal articulated the opposition to SIR saying the state always gets heavy rain during Nov and Dec when north-east monsoon is active. “Because of this, the common people will be preparing for the same and the revenue officials who are enlisted as BLOs/EROs/AEROs will have to manage the flood reliefs as well. Hence, practically, this period of time is not conducive for conducting SIR,” he said. As an additional ground to oppose SIR, he said Dec and Jan are harvesting seasons when most agriculturists and farmers would not be available at their homes to participate in the voter enumeration exercise under SIR. This would be followed by Christmas holidays and Pongal; thus, people would not be available from December 24 till Jan 18, he added. An MP from TMC, who has challenged SIR in West Bengal, told the bench through senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee that many areas of the state do not have 4G/5G mobile services making it difficult for the citizens to upload their data on the EC website or access the website for corrections. Appearing for Election Commission, senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi said it is surprising that when it comes to correction/revision of voter lists, the states are competing to show how backward they are. Sibal also termed the enumeration form as incomprehensible for the commoners and pointed out the departures from the Bihar-SIR to the pan-India exercise apart from accusing the Election Commission of squeezing the schedule to just a month when similar exercises earlier were carried out on a much longer period. “This would result in lakhs of voters getting disenfranchised,” he said. For an NGO, which had challenged Bihar SIR and now expanded its scope to challenge pan-India SIR, advocate Prashant Bhushan said EC has a software to erase duplication of voters but is not using it. SC asked EC to respond whether it could use such software to delete duplicate entries in the state voter lists. It also acknowledged the importance of Bhushan’s plea for supply of acknowledgement slips to voters by EC against submission of voter enumeration forms. However, the SC was unsure whether it could direct the EC to upload machine-readable voter lists, given the earlier direction of SC contrary to it. Instead, it asked Bhushan to consider whether individual voters could be given OTP access to his own data in the voter list.
