AI-driven digitisation errors causing widespread hardship during SIR: Mamata Banerjee to CEC

Kolkata: West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee wrote to CEC Gyanesh Kumar again on Monday, claiming that AI-driven digitisation errors in the 2002 electoral rolls were causing widespread hardship to genuine voters during the SIR exercise.

In her fifth letter to the chief election commissioner since the beginning of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, Banerjee said serious errors occurred in elector particulars during the digitisation of the 2002 voters' list using AI tools, leading to large-scale data mismatches and wrongful categorisation of genuine voters as having "logical discrepancies".

Accusing the EC of disregarding its own statutory processes followed over the last two decades, she said electors were being compelled to re-establish identity despite earlier corrections made after "quasi-judicial hearings".

"Such an approach, disowning its own actions and mechanisms spanning more than two decades, is arbitrary, illogical and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution of India," she alleged.

Banerjee also alleged that no proper acknowledgement was being issued for documents submitted during SIR, claiming that the procedure was "fundamentally flawed".

She said the SIR hearing process had become "largely mechanical, driven purely by technical data", and was "completely devoid of the application of mind, sensitivity and human touch", claiming that it undermined "the bedrock of our democracy and constitutional framework".