19,000 West Bengal voters to miss bypolls as appeals remain pending in tribunals

Nearly 19,000 voters in West Bengal’s Nandigram and Rejinagar Assembly constituencies, where byelections are being held on Tuesday (October 6, 2026), are among the 38.31 lakh voters in West Bengal who remain disenfranchised due to the crawling pace of work at the Appellate Tribunals where their cases are pending. The Calcutta High Court had in July observed that at the current rate, it would take 21 years for the tribunals to clear the cases.

In Rejinagar, the total number of appeals submitted was 12,452, out of which four have been included so far, and in Nandigram, the total number of appeals submitted was 6,443, with 89 included so far. While in both places, no one has been excluded so far, the tribunals have, till now, cleared only 1.26 lakh of the total 38.31 lakh appeals, which is approximately 3% of the total cases.

Out of the 19 Appellate Tribunals set up by the Election Commission (ECI) in March, only 16 remain functional, as three retired judges — Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, Justice Ranjit Bag and Justice Indrajit Chatterjee — have quit, citing various functional issues. Their positions remain vacant.

The ECI’s proposal to increase the number of tribunals from 19 to 42 has also not moved forward. The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear the matter on Monday (October 5), but it was not listed.

The poll body’s special “door-to-door” drive to re-enrol any voter left behind during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process through Form 6, announced last week, will also not be applicable to them.

The Appellate Tribunals came out of the Supreme Court’s supervision of the SIR. Judicial officers, drawn from a list the Calcutta High Court sent at the Supreme Court’s direction, were adjudicating the roughly 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases. On March 10, the top court had directed that a separate appellate body be set up so that people could challenge those officers’ decisions.

Of the roughly 60 lakh “doubtful” cases, the 700 judicial officers cleared and restored approximately 32.77 lakh (32,77,360) voters onto the electoral rolls. The remaining 27.23 lakh were rejected, of whom 22 lakh appealed to the tribunals.

The ECI constituted the Appellate Tribunals for West Bengal on March 21. The tribunals began functioning around April 13, and on April 16, the Supreme Court ordered that voters whose appeals succeed be added through a supplementary list. The verdict came only days before Assembly elections began on April 23, and reportedly only 136 names had been cleared by then.

Parallelly, 16,10,311 bulk appeals were instituted at the Appellate Tribunals challenging the decision to include voters restored by the judicial officers, bringing the total number of cases pending in the tribunals to a little more than 38 lakh.