Almost equal to the entire population of Jamaica. More than thrice the population of Bhutan.

That is what the number of Bengal voters deleted through the adjudication process alone comes to: Twenty-seven lakh, sixteen thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine.

If these people were to form their own country, it would be the 143rd largest among the 195 commonly recognised nations on the planet, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Lithuania, Namibia and Kuwait.

These 27 lakh will remain deleted — unless the Supreme Court intervenes — with the Election Commission freezing the Bengal rolls on Thursday night.

This, at a time when the tribunals set up on apex court orders to hear challenges to these deletions have heard just four appeals.

Four out of 27,16,393 (initial deletions). This is roughly equivalent to the total enrolment at Calcutta’s South Point school compared with the estimated world population.

Each of the four hearings needed Supreme Court intervention. In each case, the tribunal upheld the appeal, in some instances commenting that the original deletion reflected a lack of application of mind by the adjudicator concerned.

That has not stopped the poll panel from pulling up the drawbridge on the 27,16,389 left in the moat, whose best hope now seems to be the post-dated cheque of a belated tribunal clearance that will allow them to vote in future elections.

As for the appellate tribunals, notionally set up more than a fortnight ago, they remain largely a ghost-grid of empty rooms and unstaffed desks.

The Supreme Court had directed the establishment of a centralised appellate mechanism with 21 chambers at the Syama Prasad Mookerjee National Institute of Water and Sanitation in Calcutta, but the infrastructure remains non-functional.

Hapless voters have, however, been queuing before government offices to file offline appeals against their exclusion across districts such as North and South 24-Parganas, East Midnapore, Cooch Behar, Nadia, Malda and Birbhum, where single-member tribunals have been proposed.

In Ranaghat, Nadia, 68-year-old Jiban Krishna Biswas collapsed and died after a cardiac arrest while waiting to file a petition on Thursday. In Magrahat, South 24-Parganas, 46-year-old Mahmud Gazi met with the same fate on Friday.

Well over 2 lakh online applications and another estimated 5 lakh offline applications have been filed so far.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee flagged the absurdity of the situation on Friday, telling a rally in Barasat: “It is astonishing that the functioning of the tribunals is yet to even begin.”

To put matters in perspective, the four spared by the tribunals include two Congress candidates who needed their names on the voter list just to be able to contest.

The other two are Suprabuddha Sen, 88, and his 82-year-old wife Deepa Sen. Suprabuddha is the grandson of Nandalal Bose, illustrator of the Constitution of India.

“We would not have had any illustrations in the Constitution if not for his grandfather,” senior advocate (and Trinamool Rajya Sabha member) Menaka Guruswamy had told the apex court.

Sen, restored to the rolls but weary from the battle, was blunt: “I don’t know why my name was deleted.… (It was restored) maybe because I am Nandalal Bose’s grandson and because of the media attention. I feel bad for the lakhs of others.”

For Congress candidate Motab Sheikh of Farakka, restored to the rolls by a tribunal, his victory is a hollow one.

“Some 38,222 voters have been deleted in my constituency, but no tribunal has come up there. It’s not possible for everyone to move the Supreme Court,” he said.

The Election Commission has now released Assembly-segment-wise data, which confirms a pattern already highlighted by media investigations.

Seven of the 10 constituencies with the highest deletions are in Muslim-majority Murshidabad district. They include Samserganj, Lalgola, Bhagabangola and Raghunathganj. Samserganj has witnessed 74,755 deletions.

Official figures suggest that 90.83 lakh voters have been scrubbed off the list, which is nearly 11.9 per cent of Bengal’s electorate.

Only the 27 lakh deleted after the adjudication of their “logical discrepancies” can appeal to the tribunals.

The rest – deleted during the initial scrutiny for reasons such as being unmapped, shifted, absent, duplicate or dead -- have to seek redress from officials such as the district electoral officers if they believe their exclusion is unjustified.