A committee of seven former high court judges and serving or retired district judges, additional district judges, and additional district and sessions judges will determine the cases of voter enrollment over which micro-observers and electoral registration officers (EROs) failed to reach a consensus in the ongoing SIR drive.

The decision was taken at a meeting in the chamber of the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, Sujoy Paul, on Saturday.

The Supreme Court had on Friday ordered the deployment of serving and retired judicial officers to resolve issues related to "logical discrepancies" before the final SIR roll was released.

"It was decided that a group of seven retired Calcutta High Court judges, who would be selected by the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, would resolve the cases in north and south Calcutta, in which disputes cropped up. Similarly, the disputed cases in districts will be resolved by district judges, additional district judges and additional district and sessions judges. The judges will start working from Monday," said a source present at the meeting.

Chief electoral officer (CEO) Manoj Agarwal, chief secretary Nandini Chakravorty and DGP Piyush Pandey were present at the meeting.

A senior official of the Election Commission said district election officers (DEOs) would help the judges in the districts get acquainted with the system, to which voter documents were uploaded after hearings. This will be done by Sunday, and the judges can take up the cases from Monday.

"The micro-observers and the state government representatives will help the judges take a call on the disputed cases. If the EC or the government does not agree with any decision of the judges in the districts, these could be referred to the group of seven retired high court judges in Calcutta, who would take a final call. If the Chief Justice of the high court feels that the process needs to be expedited, he can call further meetings and give the required instructions. Both the EC and the government agreed on this," said a source.

The senior EC official explained the cases which were being considered as disputed.

"There are several cases which the AEROs and EROs approved for inclusion in the final rolls, although the micro observers or the roll observers found discrepancies in the enumeration forms and documents submitted by them. The final figure of such cases will be determined post midnight on Saturday, which is the last day to dispose of cases by the AEROs and EROs," said the official.

Sources said the figure could be around 50 lakh, 20 lakh of which are pending with the assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs) and the EROs after they were flagged by the micro observers because of a lack of specified documents.

Another 30 lakh cases were detected to be suspicious during the super-checking by the EC after they were cleared by the EROs and AEROs.

"In short, there are 50 lakh cases which lack proper documents and were flagged by the EC representatives. Some of them will be cleared by Saturday midnight and the remaining will have to be taken up by the judges," said an official.

Sources said it initially appeared that the cases which could be cleared by February 27 would be included in the final rolls. The remaining cases could be taken up, determined and eligible cases would be included in the rolls later on through supplementary lists.

Claiming that the EROs were no longer able to monitor the progress of the AEROs on the ECINet portal with respect to the conduct of the SIR in Bengal, Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee said in a Facebook post: "Nobody, I repeat NOBODY, has the authority to play God with the democratic rights of Bengal’s voters. The BANGLA-BIRODHI ZAMINDARS who believe they can pull the strings and orchestrate a voter deletion racket must understand that they will be held accountable, both in the court of law and in the court of the people."