More than two dozen residents of a Nadia village, who lost their voting rights, came to Calcutta earlier this week.

They were rallied by a platform fighting a legal battle to reclaim people’s voting rights.

They were from Debagram village, part of the Kaliganj Assembly seat, around 170km from the heart of the city. A minor mismatch in a name or having multiple siblings has pushed many of them outside the rolls.

Almost everyone who came to the Press Club on Monday was Muslim, the majority of them women.

They have filed online applications. They are desperate to get their fingers inked. But they are hoping against hope. None of them received any communication from the SIR tribunals regarding a possible hearing date.

Many disenfranchised voters visited the central institute in Joka, which houses the tribunals. They were turned away from the gates by the central force personnel. The Supreme Court on Monday said it would seek a report from Calcutta High Court chief justice on claims that the 19 appellate tribunals in Bengal were not yet fully functional and were accepting only online appeals.

“We are poor. We already have enough problems. But everything else has now taken a back seat. Losing my vote is not letting me sleep in peace. I know I am a genuine voter, but I cannot prove it,” said Tara Khatun Bibi, 31.

Tara’s father’s name was missing from the rolls in 2002, the base year for the SIR. He was present in the previous rolls. In the enumeration form, Tara mapped herself to her grandfather, who was a voter in 2002. So did her father and four siblings — three sisters and a brother. “All of us were placed under adjudication. My father and brother were approved. All three sisters’ names were deleted,” she said.

Mumtaz Bibi, 42, has three sisters and three brothers. Two of her brothers were on the 2002 rolls. All four sisters and the remaining brother mapped themselves to their father. When the supplementary list came out, all five who had mapped themselves to their father got struck off the revised rolls.

A 32-year-old woman is named as Mosa Rehaba Khatun Bibi, spelt in Bengali, on her voter card. On her Aadhaar card, she is MST Rehaba Khatun Bibi. She was fighting a double jolt. Her father’s name was also missing from the 2002 rolls, and she, along with her mother and five siblings, was mapped to Rehaba’s maternal grandfather. Eventually, everyone but Rehaba found a place on the revised rolls.

Raju Ghosh, who runs an NGO and is a Trinamool functionary, has filed a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking the restoration of voting rights of around 100 people, many of them linked to the NGO he is associated with.

“In the run-up to SIR, the narrative centred around Rohingya and Bangladeshi infiltrators. Where are these people? These people who have been deleted are our own people. They are as Indian as any of us,” said Ghosh at the Press Club.

Arindam Das, an advocate, went to Joka to seek an expedited hearing for these disenfranchised voters.

He was turned away from the gates.

“This violates the principle of natural justice. The fate of 27 lakh people deleted after adjudication is in the hands of the tribunals. We expect the tribunals to work around the clock. However, there is nothing to suggest that they are. The appeals of two poll candidates, also removed from the rolls, were heard by a tribunal. In both cases, the voting rights were restored because the Election Commission could not defend the deletions. That means, there is a precedent,” said Das.

Nadia voted in the first phase of the elections on Thursday.