A little more than 47 lakh of the 60.06 lakh cases to be adjudicated in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls (SIR) underway in Bengal had been disposed of till Tuesday evening and the entire process would be complete by April 7, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said on Wednesday.

“We are quite happy and optimistic about the facts and figures; 47 lakh-something disposed of by yesterday. Around 1.75 lakh to 2 lakh cases are being dealt with every day. By April 7, we are informed, all objections likely to be decided,” CJI Kant said during a hearing on petitions in the apex court on the SIR process.

The matter came up before a three-member bench that included Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul Pancholi.

The Supreme Court had earlier set a deadline to publish the supplementary list of voters till the last date of nominations. For the first phase of the Bengal election for 152 out of the 294 Assembly seats, the last date for filing nominations is April 6. For the remaining 144 seats, it is April 9.

The voting in the two phases will be held on April 23 and April 29.

The final draft rolls published on February 28 with names of 6.44 crore electors in Bengal had detailed the number of voters marked “under adjudication” in each Assembly seat. Subsequently, the supplementary lists, first published close to midnight on March 23, did not give any details on the number of voters deleted in any of the constituencies.

Sources in the Election Commission have indicated to The Telegraph Online that around 44 per cent of the voters marked under adjudication have been struck off the voters’ list.

The counsels for Bengal and chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Kapil Sibal and Kalyan Bandyopadhyay, raised the issue of bulk new-voter forms (Form 6) being submitted at the chief electoral officer’s office, to which the CJI directed them to appellate tribunals.

Senior advocate Shyam Diwan raised the issue of the deletions, saying that the degree of exclusion was very high, but the bench did not intervene.

The counsel for the Election Commission, Dama Seshadri Naidu, informed the bench that training of the judicial officers in the 19 appellate tribunals set up to hear appeals of voters deleted after adjudication will start from Wednesday.

The state government has made arrangements at Joka’s Shyama Prasad Mookerjee National Institute of Water and Sanitation (SPM-NIWAS) in south Kolkata as the venue for all the appellate tribunals.

Excluded voters can appeal through the ECI Net platform or physically at the offices of the sub-divisional officers or the district magistrate, which would be digitised and uploaded on the portal.