West Bengal’s Chief Electoral Officer has instructed all district magistrates to intensify efforts to ensure greater accuracy in the state’s electoral rolls. The CEO’s office has extended the deadline for uploading enumeration forms from 4 December to 11 December, giving officials at various levels, including Booth-Level Officers (BLOs) and Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), an additional week to complete and verify data.
The directive specifies that all forms currently with BLOs must be uploaded by 2 December. Any form received after that date must be uploaded immediately on the same day. After the final deadline of 11 December, enumeration forms submitted from households will be marked as “uncollectable.”
The CEO has emphasised that this extra time should be used to thoroughly re-verify all collected data. Entries made through the app must be checked against physical documents. Forms submitted by organisations or third parties must be scrutinised more carefully than those filled directly by voters. BLOs have been warned that they will be held responsible for any errors and could face strict action for negligence.
Special verification has been ordered in several specific cases: voters listed as heads of households whose age in 2002 was recorded as 60 or above; voters who are now 50 or older but whose earlier records only listed a parent’s name; and cases where parent-child relationships noted in the 2025 rolls do not match earlier records. In such circumstances, officials must contact households or conduct direct visits to authenticate identity.
Forms for missing family members that were signed by someone else must also be followed up through phone or in-person verification to ensure that individuals are not simultaneously registered in another constituency.
Extra attention will be paid to polling booths marked as sensitive in previous elections, booths where more than half the entries involve parent-child mapping, and areas with unusually high numbers of uncollectable forms. The CEO’s office will conduct a review of progress in a video conference later this week.
This initiative is part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision drive, aimed at ensuring that West Bengal’s electoral list is up-to-date, comprehensive, and free from discrepancies ahead of upcoming elections.