West Bengal chief secretary urges Election Commission to extend document upload deadline for voter inclusion

West Bengal Chief Secretary Nandini Chakraborty, in a letter to Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, requested to allow the ECInet portal to be kept open till today for uploading of hearing related documents in connection with logical discrepancies. She expressed concern that otherwise, names of many valid voters may be left out, whose hearings were done on February 13 or 14^th and they might miss the opportunity to exercise their franchise, she noted in the letter, a highly placed source told ET on Monday.

Expressing concern over the matter to Bharti, Chakraborty also informed that from February 15, “the option for uploading of documents of those cases for which the ERO/AERO had issued notices in connection with logical discrepancies and completed the hearing on Feb 13/14, has been withdrawn on the ECinet,” the letter seen by ET said.

Chakraborty expressed concern that “there are strong possibilities that many valid electors will be left out and miss the opportunity to vote” because their documents could not be uploaded despite hearings being completed.


A district wise number of such cases were enclosed with her letter. The list included the names, where "hearings were completed but the documents could not be uploaded on the portal” were also enclosed with the Chief Secretary’s letter, Nabanna state secretariat sources told ET.

She requested Bharti to bring the matter to the notice of the ECI to consider keeping the document upload option on the ECInet portal open till today (February) for “completion of the process”.

Consequently, according to the Chief Secretary, the EROS/AEROs could not “upload documents submitted by the persons, who appeared for hearing on February 13 or 14, 2026 and submitted documents in support of proof of their name, identity, linkage etc.”

The last date of hearing of the West Bengal SIR process was on February 14 (an extended date) while the date of final publication was on February 28.