A 65-year-old city resident said he received not one, but two notices from the Election Commission over a “logical discrepancy” in the voter rolls, even though the details in his electoral form were accurate. The second notice arrived a week after the hearing date it listed.

Abhijit Mitra, a resident of Rajani Gupta Row in Baithakkhana, central Calcutta, said he first received an SIR notice on January 23, requiring him to appear for a hearing on January 17 — a date that had passed almost a week earlier.

“The first letter was delivered to me on January 23. It mentioned that my hearing date was January 17. Even more strange was the reason for the hearing,” Mitra told Metro on Thursday.

The notice stated: “Special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll is ongoing in your Assembly constituency. Your duly signed enumeration form has been received. After scrutiny, it has been observed that: ‘That the age difference between you and your parent, whose details are used to link you with the electoral rolls prepared during the previous SIR, is less than 15 years, that seems to be due to incorrect matching.’”

Mitra said the claim was “absurd”. “All the details I had filled up in the enumeration form had the clear mention of my date of birth and that of my father. Our age gap is a little more than 41 years. I don’t know where they got their data,” he said.

Mitra’s passport shows he was born in 1961. His father, Prafulla Mitra, according to his voter ID, was born in 1919. The 2002 electoral list shows Prafulla Mitra as 82 years old at the time. By 2026, he would have been 106, making the age difference with his son over 41 years.

Mitra, a school coordinator, recalled his experience at the hearing centre on January 31, after receiving the second letter, where he submitted all relevant documents to prove his father’s actual age.

“The EC has no business passing judgment on the age at which someone fathered a child. Even for argument’s sake, if the age gap between me and my father were 15 years, how would that make my voting rights questionable?” he asked.

The EC has issued SIR notices across the country to identify “logical discrepancies” in voter rolls, including cases where the age gap between parent and child appears to be less than 15 years. Lakhs of voters have received similar letters.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen also received a similar notice.

It stated that the age gap between Sen and his mother was “less than 15 years” and asked him to appear for a hearing at his home in Santiniketan.

Mitra said hundreds of others had queued at the hearing centre, all complaining of “harassment” caused by the SIR notices.

“The worst part was when I asked on what basis they calculated my father’s age and why I was being called. The only response I got was, ‘We do not know that. We have been sent this list by the EC. It was derived through AI,’” he said.

Mitra submitted documents showing both his and his father’s dates of birth to prove the EC’s scrutiny was incorrect.