This is the first in a series of articles on the tribunal hearings on Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.§The Supreme Court had directed the creation of Appellate Tribunals in West Bengal on March 10, 2026. The apex court made the ruling while hearing proceedings initiated by Mostari Banu, a 44-year-old homemaker from a remote village at Bhagwangola in Murshidabad who filed the first legal challenge against the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in West Bengal. The premise was that removal from the roll would not be final. A person wrongly struck off would have somewhere to go.Twenty-seven lakh people were entitled to use that mechanism. On the commission’s own adjudication return, 27,16,393 electors were found not eligible by judicial officers and removed. Every one of them had a right of appeal.About seven lakh used this right.The figure was given to the Supreme Court 168 days after the tribunals were ordered into existence. Senior counsel Gopal Sankaranarayanan told the bench that of the roughly 38 lakh appeals sitting before the tribunals, only about seven lakh had been filed by people seeking restoration. The rest were challenges to other people’s inclusion, filed by the commission itself and by private objectors. The commission has not disputed the division. The court has ordered it to produce a category-wise account of its own.That leaves 20,16,393 people, 74.23% of everyone removed by adjudication, who did not go to a tribunal at all.What the number isThe last row is not a fourth group. The 75,443 restored are drawn from the seven lakh who appealed, not from the 27 lakh as a whole. They are 2.78% of everyone found not eligible and 10.78% of those who actually asked. The rest of the seven lakh are still waiting. The 20 lakh who never appealed are not even being considered here.One caveat belongs with the 75,443 wherever it appears. The commission’s return records that many electors as included following appeal. Appeals seeking inclusion and appeals seeking exclusion are counted in the same table, an inclusion can mean a restoration appeal was allowed or that a challenge to somebody’s inclusion was dismissed. It is a roll outcome, not necessarily an appeal outcome.Twenty lakh is 2.95% of the roll West Bengal voted on. It is more than eight times the electorate of an average assembly constituency and close to seven times the largest.The commission’s published deleted-elector lists, which total 27,05,027 against the 27,16,393 in its adjudication return, carry close to 19 lakh Muslim names on a surname classification of those lists. That is 70.2% of the names on the lists, against a Muslim share of the West Bengal electorate of 23.6%. Set against the share of the state’s population rather than its electorate, which is the wider and more conservative comparison, it is 70.2% against 27%.Fifteen days, and no order sinceVoters had a 15-day window between the deletion of their names from the electoral rolls and the appeal stage. That window closed months ago.Neither the ECI nor the court has provided any clarity on whether it can be reopened. Government sources told The Telegraph in August that if anyone still wanted to appeal, they “might be allowed to do so on humanitarian grounds.” That is the only published basis on which a person removed in March might still reach a tribunal in September.A public interest writ petition brought by Prasenjit Bose against the ECI and others, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 819 of 2026, says that route has failed in practice. It also notes that the most Form 6 applications from deleted electors have been rejected without explanation, and that speaking orders for those rejections were never served. In an application for directions filed on August 24, 2026, Bose asked the court to let deleted electors appeal to the tribunals at any stage of the revision. 82,782 decisions against 38 lakh appealsThe tribunals have decided 82,782 appeals of all kinds out of the 38,10,620 on file.Let’s assume that each of those 82,782 decisions concerned an elector found not eligible and seeking restoration. The tribunal only looked into those appeals for restoration who were found not eligible during the judicial review, and not any of the 31 lakh additional appeals for deletion of voters who made it to the eligible list for 2026 West Bengal assembly elections. That’s the best case scenario here. Even then, only 11.83% of the seven lakh could have been resolved, and 6,17,218 restoration appeals, 88.17% of the stream, would still be pending. That is a floor. Every decision that actually went to a challenge pushes it higher.Across the whole 27 lakh, three-quarters never appealed, at least 88% of the quarter who did are still waiting, and 75,443 people have their names back.The tribunals issued those 82,782 decisions in their first 150 days, about 552 a day. Even if every decision from here went to a restoration appeal and none to the 31 lakh challenges, the 6,17,218 pending would take three years to clear. If restoration appeals continue to receive only their proportionate share of the tribunals’ attention, they take 17. West Bengal votes for Kolkata and Howrah in December, for panchayats in 2028 and for parliament in 2029.Twenty constituencies where take-up was probably worse than the state averageThe commission has not published where the seven lakh appellants are. Its return gives one combined appeal total for each constituency and one combined outcome. It does not record who filed an appeal, whether the appeal sought inclusion or exclusion, or whether it was allowed or dismissed.The table does, however, bound the answer in one direction. A restoration appeal is filed by a person the constituency found not eligible, so it cannot exceed either the appeals recorded in that constituency or the number of people found not eligible there. In 124 of the 294 constituencies, appeals of every kind number fewer than the electors found not eligible. Take-up in those seats is capped, and the cap can be read straight off the return.In 20 of them the cap falls below the statewide take-up figure of 25.77%. Those 20 found 3,47,020 electors not eligible between them and recorded 61,881 appeals of every kind, so no more than 17.83% of them could have appealed. They have restored 1,618.Lalgola is the largest single case. It found 55,420 electors not eligible, recorded 7,615 appeals of every kind, and has restored six people.These 20 are not concentrated in one kind of place. Three are in North 24 Parganas, three in Birbhum, three in Murshidabad, two each in Kolkata South, Paschim Bardhaman, Hooghly and South 24 Parganas. Ballygunge and Rashbehari are among the wealthiest constituencies in Kolkata. The ceiling is silent in the other 170 constituencies, because there appeals outnumber the electors found not eligible and the bound does not bite. Nothing can be said about take-up in Malda, where 6,85,341 appeals were filed against 2,39,375 findings, until the category-wise return is filed.No appeal, no welfareThe cost is not confined to the vote.Districts compiled lists of appellants because the state government decided to keep paying welfare benefits to people who had appealed their deletion, at least until the tribunals rule. A senior official told The Telegraph that those who had not appealed after being left off the voter list “would not receive benefits under any government scheme.”That converts the 20 lakh from a category of people who did not file a form into a category of people cut off from state provision for not having filed one. The authorities gave an elector 15 days to appeal to the tribunal. Those 15 days now sort who holds a working ration card and who does not.