Voters in West Bengal who were dropped from the electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) may end up waiting well over a decade to have their appeals heard, if the appellate tribunals set up on the Supreme Court’s orders continue working at their current rate.
According to an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court by the Election Commission, the tribunals have resolved 1,26,194 appeals in the five months since they began functioning in mid-April — an average of roughly 25,238 cases per month, even counting weekends as working days. As of September 16, when the affidavit was filed, 37,05,235 cases were still pending. At this rate, clearing the backlog entirely, even working all seven days a week, would take around 146 months, or over 12 years.
A backlog too large to manage
The Election Commission acknowledged that the existing number of tribunals isn’t enough to handle the scale of the task, i.e. nearly 37 lakh pending cases. The EC asked the court to nearly double the number of tribunals in the state, from 24 to 42, while also permitting judicial officers to conduct proceedings remotely.
In its affidavit, filed in response to a plea by TMC MP Derek O’Brien, the Commission proposed increasing the number of appellate tribunals in West Bengal to match the number of parliamentary constituencies in the state, in order to speed up the clearance of pending appeals. It added that letting judicial staff work from home would help speed up case disposal by cutting down on travel time.
In a separate affidavit responding to a petition about how the tribunals are being run, the Commission said the tribunals were created in line with the Supreme Court’s directions, and that their standard operating procedure (SOP) was drawn up by a committee that includes retired judges of the Calcutta High Court.
On the specific concerns raised about accessibility and procedure, the Commission’s stance was that these fall under the SOP’s purview and are best addressed by the tribunals and the authorities overseeing them, rather than through direct court intervention.
