294 SDM or higher-level officers appointed Bengal returning officers

THe Election direction of bharat (ECI) on th officially prescribed returning officers (RO) for all 294 assembly constituencies in West Bengal. For the first time, all 294 constituencies have sub-divisional magistrate-level or higher officers as RO, bringing West Bengal in line with the rest of India. Until now, 152 of Bengal’s 294 constituencies were managed by officers below the SDM rank, a senior ECI official said.The SDMs who will now serve as RO in the upcoming elections had earlier and now serving as Electoral Registration Officers (ERO) during the Special Intensive Revision(SIR) process.The West Bengal government earlier proposed Group B and Group C officials for the critical roles of RO and Electoral Registration Officers, who decide which nomination papers are valid, resolve voter eligibility disputes and ultimately declare election results. The commission had demanded senior Group A officers — IAS-rank or equivalent district-level officials.The RO seniority dispute was one thread in a much larger legal battle fought in the Supreme Court under Writ Petition (Mostari Banu vs Election Commission of India) and connected petitions, including those filed by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee herself and TMC MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen, all challenging the ECI’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of West Bengal’s electoral rolls launched on November 4, 2025. The officer seniority issue came to a head during the February 20, 2026 Supreme Court hearing before Chief Justice Surya Kant’s bench, when the ECI told the court that Bengal was not providing Group A officers of adequate rank specifically for conducting the SIR process — particularly as Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs), who are required to pass quasi-judicial orders deciding which voters stay on the roll and which are deleted. These are not general election duty posts — EROs during SIR hold the power to include or exclude voters from the electoral roll, making their seniority and legal authority directly consequential to who gets to vote.Critically, the same SDM-rank officer who serves as ERO during the SIR process is also appointed as RO for the same or another Assembly constituency during the election itself. This means the seniority dispute over SIR officers and the seniority dispute over ROs were not two separate problems but the same issue at two stages of the same election cycle. The court recorded that the state was obligated to provide Group A officers performing the duties of SDMs specifically for this SIR and election work. Finding it “nearly impossible to determine the status and rank of officials deployed by the State,” and — citing a complete trust deficit between the West Bengal government and the ECI over the Special Issue Resolution (SIR) process, the court ordered the deployment of judicial officers—first from the Calcutta High Court and later from Odisha and Jharkhand—to perform Electoral Roll Officer (ERO) functions instead of state officials.On Tuesday, Bengal’s Home Department sent the ECI a list of officers of the required seniority.The current West Bengal Assembly’s term ends on May 7. Elections are expected in April-May. With ROs now formally in place across all constituencies, the ECI has cleared the last major administrative hurdle before announcing the poll dates.As of now, no new comment on this RO appointment has come from the West Bengal government or TMC leaders.