The Supreme Court is set to examine on November 21 Kerala’s request to defer the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the state’s electoral rolls. The matter was mentioned on Tuesday before Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai, who indicated that the bench would take it up on Friday.
Kerala has moved the court seeking a direction to the Election Commission of India to postpone the SIR — which began on November 4 and is slated to continue till December 4 — arguing that the exercise clashes directly with the local body elections already underway in the state. The overlap, it warned, would stretch the administration beyond capacity and could trigger what it called an “administrative impasse.”
In its petition, filed through advocate C.K. Sasi, the state described the SIR as a massive, labour-intensive operation. It said the revision requires 1,76,000 government and quasi-government personnel, another 68,000 police and security staff, and an additional 25,668 officers to manage various procedural requirements.
The state told the court that its trained and election-experienced workforce is limited. Deploying such numbers for both the SIR and local body elections at the same time, it said, would be a “near-impossibility.”
“The pool of trained and election-experienced staff is finite… Parting with such a large number of officers for simultaneous SIR and local body elections is a near impossibility, apart from possibly putting the State to an administrative impasse,” the petition noted.
Kerala has 1,200 local self-government institutions, including 941 grama panchayats, 152 block panchayats, 14 district panchayats, 87 municipalities and six corporations, spread across 23,612 wards. Under Articles 243-E and 243-U of the Constitution, and the Kerala Panchayat Raj and Municipality laws, these elections must be completed before December 21, 2025.
The Kerala State Election Commission has already issued the polling schedule:
- December 9: Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Alappuzha, Kottayam, Idukki, Ernakulam
- December 11: Thrissur, Palakkad, Malappuram, Kozhikode, Wayanad, Kannur, Kasaragod
The notification came out on November 14. Withdrawal of nominations closes on November 24. Counting is on December 13, and the entire process must conclude by December 18.
The state said the chief electoral officer has already made it clear that officers on duty for the local body elections cannot be reassigned for the SIR. Conducting the polls requires a large and specialised team — returning officers, assistant returning officers, electoral registration officers, sector officers, trainers, presiding officers, polling officers, and technical teams for EVM checking.
“These personnel should not be appointed as Booth Level Officers (BLOs),” Kerala cautioned, arguing that allowing the SIR to run during election preparations would undermine the smooth and timely conduct of the polls.
While the state reiterated that it continues to challenge the constitutional validity of the SIR itself, it clarified that the present petition deals solely with timing — and the risk that the revision exercise could disrupt an election cycle bound by strict constitutional deadlines.
The Supreme Court will now take up the matter on Friday.
