As many as 1,157 voters living in Char Jatrasiddhi, a village under Kalyani Assembly segment in Nadia, are uncertain about how to submit their SIR enumeration forms because their names, as well as their parents and grandparents, have not appeared in the 2002 voter list.

The voters also lack supporting documents to link their ancestry.

Barely three kilometres from Kalyani town, the village sits on a patch of land embraced by a canal of the Ganga. The geographical isolation often makes its residents feel as if they live on an island beyond the administration’s reach.

For nearly three decades before the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, they were unable to exercise their voting rights due to the geographical ambiguity caused by erosion along the Hooghly riverbank.

Originally hailing from Bihar, the residents — belonging mostly to backward communities — had settled along the Hooghly riverbank in Hooghly district around a century ago.

Severe erosion in the 1980s forced them to migrate to Nadia. It took nearly 29 years for their names to be officially recorded, when the Bengal government, following an order of Calcutta High Court, enrolled them in the voters’ list in 2009 after organising special camps.

Now, with no historical roots in Nadia prior to their displacement and with their names absent from the 2002 voter list for obvious reasons, the 1,157 voters under polling station number 113 of Kanchrapara gram panchayat have put the district administration in a spot during the ongoing SIR exercise in Bengal.

With no documents to support their stay in Nadia in 2002, none of them could submit the enumeration form so far.

“Before we became part of Nadia district, we were bona fide voters under the Balagarh segment in Hooghly district. We cast our votes there for the last time in 1980. But the erosion forced us into Nadia district. We were included in the voter list in 2009, which was seven years after the last SIR was conducted in 2002. As a result, we were left out (in the 2002 list) despite living here during all this time,” said resident Sibsankar Mahato.

“Since the EC has set 2002 as the benchmark year and none of our 1,157 names were on the list, and since we hardly have documents, many villagers are panicking that we might be dropped from the new voter list,” Mahato added.

Last week, the villagers submitted a memorandum to the SDO of Kalyani, urging him to find a solution to their unique problem.

Local Trinamool leader and gram panchayat chief Pankaj Singh, who accompanied them, said: “The SDO assured us that he would take up the matter with the EC to find a solution.”

The Nadia administration has already submitted a report seeking advice from Bengal CEO Manoj Kumar Agarwal.

On Wednesday, CEO Agarwal visited Krishnanagar and held meetings with the district administration, during which this particular issue was also discussed, officials said.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Kalyani SDO Avijit Samanta said: “The EC has been briefed, and it has advised us to set up special camps to receive whatever supporting documents that these villagers can produce for the sake of verification. They have voted in the last few elections. Since the objective of the SIR is to ensure the inclusion of genuine voters, efforts will be made so that they remain on the fresh voter list.”

He added: “We have simultaneously advised the villagers to submit the enumeration forms at the earliest so that the necessary process can begin.”