Bengal has 6.44 crore voters and another 60 lakh doubtful voters who may or may not make it to the final list as of Saturday evening, with the Election Commission publishing the electoral rolls after its special intensive revision (SIR) exercise .
The Election Commission issued a clarification late on Saturday evening, pegging the number of total electors in Bengal to 6.44 crore, down from the 7.04 crore that the state chief electoral officer Manoj Agarwal had earlier said at a news conference.
Bengal had 7.66 crore voters before the SIR process commenced. When the draft roll was published in December 2025, that number was reduced to 7.08 crore.
The last set of data released by the commission states that 60,60,475 of those 7.08 crore names are “under adjudication”. Therefore, the number of confirmed voters as of Saturday evening is 6.44 crore, including 1,88,707 new voters added during the SIR process.
The total number of people in Bengal who will get the right to vote will be determined when the Election Commission is able to complete the verification process of the 60-lakh-plus people marked under “adjudication” in the published list.
Acting on the instructions of the Supreme Court, judicial officers from Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha are working to complete the process of adjudication.
Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal had said the electoral rolls would be available online from 5.30pm on Saturday but most voters could not access the list or check for their names on the websites till the publishing of this report.
The servers were not working for most part of the day. The booths where the lists were published witnessed huge queues.
Agarwal said 5,46,063 names were deleted from the voters’ list on the basis of Form 7 (for objections) submitted by individual electors and political parties. In the draft roll published last December, names of over 58 lakh voters were deleted.
After the draft rolls were published last December, the total number of electors was 7.08 crore.
The total number of voters deleted in Bengal since the SIR exercise was rolled out is now over 63 lakh. This is apart from the 60-lakh-plus names under adjudication.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly said 1.2 crore voters will be deleted in Bengal.
Election Commission officials maintained that deletions were primarily on account of death, migration, duplication and untraceability, while additions were processed after scrutiny of documents.
“We have tried to make the list as foolproof as possible,” Agarwal said. “It was a huge task and some mistakes happened, which we rectified at the earliest.
“We expect to complete the remainder of the process and publish the supplementary list at the earliest,” he added.
Suvendu Adhikari, leader of Opposition in the Bengal Assembly, saw a blow to the ruling Trinamool in the post-SIR electoral rolls.
“Over 63 lakh voters have already been deleted. Another 60-lakh-plus are under consideration. Even in Bhowanipore there will not be enough voters left to re-elect Mamata Banerjee,” the BJP leader said.
In the chief minister’s constituency, Bhowanipore, 47,111 voters have been deleted.
The names of Naihati Municipality ward No. 4 Trinamool councillor Sushanta Sarkar and his mother, Arati Sarkar, have been deleted from the final rolls published on Saturday, reports said.
”We are yet to see the complete list,” Trinamool MP from Barrackpore Partha Bhowmick told The Telegraph Online on Saturday afternoon.
“Without studying it in detail it would be wrong to make any comment. From what I have gathered from Naihati [in North 24-Parganas], names of genuine voters have been deleted. I have found seven doctors, railway employees and others missing. More will be found.”
Around 1.18 lakh voters have been deleted from the final rolls in Bankura district.
In Nadia, the figure is around 2.73 lakh.
Around 17,000 voters were deleted in the final draft in north Kolkata, taking the total deletion to 4.07 lakh in the area since the SIR process started.
In south Kolkata, the number stood at 3,207 while the fate of another 78,675 voters is yet to be decided.
In Alipurduar in north Bengal, 11,96,651 names featured in the final rolls, with the total deletions in the district at 1,02,835, officials said.
In several parts of Bengal, residents crowded notice boards displaying printed lists, going through pages and capturing photographs of entries on mobile phones. At district magistrate and sub-divisional offices, people waited in serpentine queues to verify whether their names had been marked 'approved', 'deleted' or kept 'under adjudication'.
With inputs from PTI