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.
