Kolkata, 23 December (H.S.) :

More than 3.2 million ‘unmapped’ voters will be called for hearings in the first phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal, officials from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) said on Monday.

According to officials, the hearings will begin from December 27. This category includes voters whose names could not be linked with other family members in the 2002 electoral rolls. During the enumeration phase, a total of 3,168,424 unmapped voters were identified across the state.

A senior official from the CEO’s office said on Tuesday morning that the process of issuing notices to around 1 million voters has already begun, while notices to the remaining nearly 2.2 million voters will be issued starting Tuesday.

The hearings will be conducted at district magistrate offices, subdivisional offices, premises of various government departments, as well as in schools and colleges. Each hearing will be monitored in the presence of micro observers, officials said.

It was also clarified that cases involving logical inconsistencies will be taken up in the next phase. For this purpose, guidelines have been sought from the Election Commission.

Meanwhile, training for around 4,000 micro observers will be held in Kolkata on December 24 in two phases. Officials said all micro observers are state government officers. Earlier in the day, Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had alleged that the micro observers lack adequate knowledge of the local Bengali language.

Separately, a delegation from the Election Commission will visit the state to review the progress of the Special Intensive Revision. Sources in the CEO’s office said that the Commission’s Principal Secretary S B Joshi and Deputy Secretary Abhinav Agrawal will arrive in the state for the review. Both officials are also scheduled to attend the micro observers’ training programme on December 24.

Hindusthan Samachar / Satya Prakash Singh