For the past 30 days, a group of Calcuttans, most of them under the age of 23, has been navigating the labyrinth of SIR data.
With some success and much dogged determination, they continue to work out of a rented space in Kidderpore.
The team is part of the Sabar Institute, a research organisation whose analysis has uncovered stark irregularities in the proportion of Muslims among deleted and under-adjudication voters.
Some members are full-time researchers who earn a salary. Others are interns receiving stipends, while a few contribute as unpaid volunteers. What binds these young men and women is a shared commitment to an inclusive India.
Their task is daunting.
Access barriers
“The SIR data is difficult to access by design,” said Ashin Chakraborty, 24. “The supplementary lists are in PDF format, which cannot be processed by standard machine learning models. A spreadsheet would have made things much easier. We are using optical character recognition software to identify text in these PDFs. The software was bought and then fine-tuned.”
Chakraborty joined Sabar in 2025 after completing a master’s in economics from Calcutta University. Now a full-time researcher, he lives on Rashbehari Avenue but has been spending nearly 20 hours a day at the Kidderpore workspace.
So far, at least 18 supplementary voter lists have been released by the Election Commission. More than 27 lakh voters under adjudication have been removed from the revised rolls, while around 33 lakh have been retained.
Each supplementary list contains two sections: one for excluded voters and another for those approved. Each Assembly segment has roughly 250 to 300 polling booths. With 294 Assembly segments in Bengal, the scale of data is enormous.
“For each Assembly segment, we have to process around 9,000 PDF files,” said Souptik Halder, 24, another researcher at the institute. “You can download lists from 10 booths at a time, but each download requires solving a captcha. For 300 booths, that means completing 30 captchas.”
Halder, a BTech in computer science from Jadavpur University, is now pursuing MTech at ISI, Calcutta. He and Chakraborty are classmates from Jadavpur Vidyapith.
A recent investigation by Alt News found that the EC published Bengal’s revised voter rolls as scanned images rather than searchable datasets, creating what it called a “wall” to limit access.
Sabar is now digitising this data and uploading it to its website, making it available for analysis by the general public.
“The days when interns are present are mostly reserved for downloading data. Analysis is done at night,” said Chakraborty.
Their findings have already raised serious concerns.
In Nandigram — BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari’s seat — Muslims account for over 95% of voters deleted after adjudication, despite forming just 26% of the population. In Bhabanipur, they account for 40% of deletions while making up 20% of the population.
“So far, we have analysed only these two constituencies,” said Sohail Mallick, 21, an intern. “Samserganj in Murshidabad and Mothabari in Malda are being analysed now.”
Mallick has studied software development at Asutosh College and spends much of his time downloading the lists.
Legal support
Last week, Sabar also began providing free legal aid to deleted voters.
Tarique Quasimuddin, an advocate at Calcutta High Court, and Sarfaraz Ahmed Khan, professor of law at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), are leading the initiative. At the forefront are young interns and volunteers working from the same Kidderpore premises. The space consists of two 200sqft rooms and a terrace.
A helpline has been set up for those seeking assistance: 8585859971.
Sabar team member Shaikh Ayaan Hossain handles most of the calls. He turned 26 on Saturday.
“I take between 50 and 100 calls from distressed voters every day,” he said.
A political science graduate from The Bhawanipur Education Society College, Ayaan lives in Park Circus. He said he would go out for dinner with his parents later but did not want the day off, wanting to be “of whatever little help possible” to hundreds of thousands facing uncertainty.
Iqra Jamshed, Rukhsar Bano, Kayanath Parveen,
Md Saif Ali and Hesamuddin, all law students aged 20-23, spend their time bent over laptops or talking to voters on the phone.
“We are helping voters with both online and offline appeals to tribunals,” said Ummair Alam, 24, who coordinates the effort. Alam is an alumnus of Jamia Hamdard University, Delhi.
Two men from different districts, both struck off the voter rolls, arrived at the office on Saturday afternoon.
“My father, elder brother and younger sister have also been deleted, even though we submitted passports, land deeds and other documents,” said Saddam Hossain Sahana, who came from Khandaghosh in East Burdwan.
Sabar Institute grew out of the decade-old Know Your Neighbour initiative that promotes shared living and community engagement.
In the past, its researchers have studied the lack of public toilets and the impact on women working in the unorganised sector.
The institute depends on donations. United Medicos, a doctors’ collective, has been supporting them with logistics.
“These young men and women believe in shared living. They are leading by example at a time when the State seems hell-bent on excluding its own people,” said Sabir Ahamed, the founder of the organisation.