E-Paper
HC rejects plea seeking SIR guidelines for panchayat poll roll revision in Uttar Pradesh
The order was passed by a division bench of chief justice Arun Bhansali and justice Jaspreet Singh on December 17 in response to a PIL filed by a resident of Sant Kabir Nagar
The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court has rejected a public interest litigation seeking the implementation of the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) guidelines for the upcoming three-tier panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh.
The order was passed by a division bench of chief justice Arun Bhansali and justice Jaspreet Singh on December 17 in response to the PIL filed by Narendra Kumar Tripathi, a resident of Sant Kabir Nagar. The court observed that the State Election Commission’s process was already at an advanced stage.
The petitioner had approached the high court seeking a direction to the respondents, including the Election Commission of India and the State Election Commission(SEC), Uttar Pradesh, to ensure that the guidelines issued for the SIR of electoral rolls for Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections are also made applicable to the three-tier panchayat elections.
The petitioner submitted that since the ECI had already issued guidelines on June 24, 2025, for a Special Intensive Revision to clean up the electoral rolls, the SEC should not have issued separate notifications (dated October 7, 2025 and November 18, 2025) for a distinct revision process for the panchayat polls.
The core contention was that running two separate revision processes constitutes a “double process” that wastes public time and the efforts of government servants.
The court, however, refused to interfere with the ongoing process, observing that the State Election Commission’s procedure for the revision of electoral rolls had commenced significantly earlier and now the provisional list was about to be published on December 23. With this observation, the court dismissed the plea.
