The Supreme Court on Thursday (October 9, 2025) said the litigious road traversed in the Bihar Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise must have made the Election Commission of India (ECI) “wiser”, even as it activated paralegal volunteers and legal aid lawyers in Bihar to help 3.66 lakh people excluded from the final voter list file appeals without delay.“You have decided to carry out SIR on a pan-India basis. So, this experience [with Bihar] would have made you wiser now… The next time you introduce a SIR module, owing to what you experienced now, you would also bring some improvement,” Justice Surya Kant, heading a Bench comprising Justice Joymalya Bagchi, addressed the ECI orally.Also read: Bihar SIR hearing highlightsSenior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, for the ECI, reacted that “obviously the ECI has learnt, even criticisms help”.Advocates Prashant Bhushan and Neha Rathi, for NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, said the petitioners who have challenged the June 24 SIR notification in Bihar were “only asking them to follow their own rules and manuals and be transparent”.Meanwhile, during the hearing, Mr. Dwivedi urged the court to pass an order that would aid in the filing of appeals against the exclusions in the final electoral roll.“I beseech My Lords that those who want to file appeals file in time. In five days, the doors will be closed,” Mr. Dwivedi submitted.Aid for appealsThe court, in a short order, formally presented that there were about 3.66 lakh persons deleted from the final electoral roll. The petitioners claimed that many among them were not given any individual communication explaining the reasons for deleting their names.The ECI, the court said, has categorically taken the stand that each of these 3.66 lakh persons was given a detailed and reasoned order of deletion.“Since time to file an appeal is running short, we deem it appropriate for the executive chairman of the Bihar State Legal Services Authority to send a communication today itself to secretaries of the district legal services authorities,” the court directed.The secretaries would ensure that paralegal volunteers and legal aid lawyers in every village of the State are activated. They would contact Booth Level Officers and collect the names and information of the excluded people village-wise, approach these people and help draft and fight their appeals before the appellate authorities.The information about these excluded people should be collated by the legal service authority and submitted as a status report to the apex court in a week.The court said it would consider later whether to pass any directions to the appellate authorities to consider these appeals within a specifc time and pass speaking orders.Justice Kant said the order on these appeals cannot be “a cryptic one-liner”.The court said the same legal help would be extended to people who were excluded from the draft roll and had filed claims challenging the deletion.Anomalies aplentyDuring the hearing, Mr. Dwivedi said an affidavit filed by a person, acting through Mr. Bhushan’s client, that his name was present in the draft roll but deleted from the final roll was found to be “false”. His name was not there in the draft roll, as claimed. The address given by him was that of a woman.“So, there is no proof such a person even exists,” Justice Kant remarked.Mr. Bhushan, deciding to take the offensive, asked, “Why is the ECI shying away from giving the separate list of over 21 lakh add-on voters and 3.66 lakh deleted voters… Why is the ECI not providing this info in a machine-readable format?”In his short address to the Bench, activist Yogendra Yadav pointed out the stark anomalies in the final voter list, including 100-year-olds registered as fresh voters, names and details left blank, names written in Kannada and Tamil.“Bihar SIR has seen the largest shrinkage of voters,” he submitted.Mr. Yadav submitted that a large percentage of people included in the list had not shown even a single one of the 11 ‘indicative’ documents. The ECI had known this, and BLOs were quietly instructed to put the names back on the list to prevent a huge hole in the number of registered voters, he said.