Kolkata, 19 January (H.S.) :

With less than a month remaining for completion of hearings on claims and objections to the draft voters’ list in West Bengal and the subsequent publication of the final electoral roll, the Election Commission of India has set a target of completing around 7,00,000 hearings per day across the state.

The Commission plans to achieve this through nearly 6,500 hearing centres operating across West Bengal. According to official sources, the target has been assessed as achievable, as each hearing centre would be required to handle an average of about 107 cases per day.

The deadline for completion of hearings on claims and objections is February 7, after which the final voters’ list will be published on February 14. Shortly after the publication of the final roll, the Election Commission is expected to announce the polling schedule for the Assembly elections in the state. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has recently stated that polling and counting are likely to be completed by the end of April.

Officials said the hearing process for “unmapped” voters is nearing completion and that cases related to “logical discrepancies” are expected to be taken up by next week. Unmapped voters are those who could not establish any linkage through either self-mapping or progeny-mapping with the voters’ list of 2002, the last time a full-scale revision exercise was conducted in West Bengal. Logical discrepancy cases pertain to voters where irregular or inconsistent family-tree details were detected during the progeny-mapping process.

The Commission has already directed that a two-stage verification and authentication of identity documents will be carried out for voters summoned for hearings. The first stage of verification will be conducted by Electoral Registration Officers, while the second stage will be undertaken by District Magistrates, who also function as District Electoral Officers.

The Commission has also clarified that domicile certificates issued by the state government and admit cards of the Madhyamik examination conducted by the state secondary education board will not be accepted as valid identity-proof documents for the purpose of verification.

Hindusthan Samachar / Satya Prakash Singh