484 electors from Kolkata’s Chinese community deleted during SIR: study

The Special Intensive Revision in West Bengal has excluded 484 electors from the Chinese community across three assembly constituencies in Kolkata, according to the city-based Sabar Institute, which conducted an analysis of the voter rolls.

The three assembly constituencies that were analysed by the Sabar Institute are Kasba, Entally and Chowrangee.

In all, 252 men and 232 women electors were deleted across the three constituencies. Kasba Assembly seat in the heart of the city, where Kolkata’s famous Chinatown is located, witnessed the deletion of 307 electors: 147 women and 160 men. In the Entally Assembly constituency, 56 individuals were excluded, of which 26 were women and 30 men. In the Chowrangee Assembly segment, 121 electors have been deleted from the voter list: 59 women and 62 men.

“By deploying a program trained on a data frame of common Chinese sounding names across lakhs of records, we confirmed that 484 individuals have been excluded from the voter rolls. However, as the dataset may not have captured less common names, we believe these figures represent a conservative undercount of the actual disenfranchisement within the community,” said Souptik Halder, researcher at Sabar Institute.

Untraceable or absent

A majority of the deleted voters, 389 of 484, have been categorised as untraceable or absent. Untraceable or absent voters are 80% of the deleted voters from the Chinese community. Untraceable or absent voters are those who have not collected SIR enumeration forms.

Another researcher with Sabar Institute, Ashin Chakraborty, pointed out that with 389 of 484 excluded electors labelled ‘untraceable’, these findings raise “concerns about the sensitivity of a verification process that may be failing to reach genuine, long-standing residents”.

Sabir Ahamed of the Sabar Institute said that Kolkata has always been a cosmopolitan city, and Chinese people have been an integral part of its culture. “ Over the past several decades, there has been a decline in the population of Chinese people, and they are restricted to a few pockets in the city,” Mr. Ahamed says. According to him, the number of people of Chinese descent in Kolkata is about 2,000 individuals.

About 58 lakh names have been deleted in the first phase of the SIR in West Bengal. The 11 Assembly constituencies of Kolkata accounted for 6.06 lakh deletions. Kolkata North recorded the highest percentage (25.92%) of deletions linked to ‘absent, shifted, dead and duplicate’ (ASDD) of all districts in the state.