Disabled voters need to queue up for SIR hearings in West Bengal despite ECI directives

Disabled voters in West Bengal face long waits and inadequate facilities for SIR hearings, despite Election Commission exemptions.

Thirty-nine-year-old Arpita Banerjee, a resident of Baranagar in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, has been battling multiple health problems since childhood, exacerbated by neurological disorders.

Born in November 1987, Ms. Banerjee had been on the earlier 2025 voter list and was included in the post-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) draft electoral rolls published in December last year. Soon after, however, she received a notice to attend a hearing over a “logical discrepancy” arising from a mismatch in the spelling of the surname “Banerjee” in her and her father’s records.

Her 76-year-old father, a small-time businessman, accompanied her to the hearing, where they had to wait for a good three hours before officials clicked her photograph and accepted her disability certificate as documentary evidence, as mandated under SIR rules. The experience, however, has left her traumatised.

Similar difficulties have been reported by other voters with disabilities. Lokman Sheikh, a person with visual disability from Raghunathganj Assembly Constituency under Murshidabad district, had to wait in the queue during his hearing, with no separate facility for people like him, despite being called over a “logical discrepancy” in his name.

The parent of a non-verbal autistic boy from Kolkata, who did not wish to be identified, said they had to wait for nearly five hours in a queue with their son for the SIR hearing, triggering severe anxiety in the child.

According to the Election Commission of India data, West Bengal had 5,07,089 registered voters with disabilities in the 2024 electoral rolls used for the Lok Sabha elections. The ECI provides a home voting facility for voters with disabilities.