West Bengal municipal elections moved closer to the November–December window after the Calcutta High Court directed the State Election Commission to erase data from stored electronic voting machines and reuse them, with specific exceptions for three Kolkata wards and Contai Municipality. The direction addresses the commission’s stated shortage of EVMs for the upcoming civic polls.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice Rabindra V. Ghugh and Justice Om Narayan Rai issued the direction during a hearing on Wednesday. The State Election Commission told the court that it was prepared to conduct municipal elections in November and December, but had faced difficulties because several EVMs from earlier elections had been kept in storage in connection with pending litigation.
The court’s direction permits the commission to address that shortage by removing data from the stored machines before putting them back into use. The EVMs connected with three wards of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Contai Municipality have been excluded from this arrangement.
The commission had approached the High Court after informing it that the number of available EVMs was insufficient for the proposed municipal elections. It had argued that using machines preserved from previous elections would remove the operational difficulty, provided the earlier data was erased.
The issue of whether old election data could be preserved on hard disks, and whether it was necessary to remove that data before the machines were used again, had come up during the previous hearing on October 12. The bench had sought the commission’s response on both questions. The commission replied that transferring the data to hard disks was possible and that the earlier information could be erased.
The dispute has arisen against the background of earlier litigation concerning municipal elections and the preservation of EVMs connected with those cases. The court’s direction therefore links the immediate logistics of the next civic polls with the handling of election equipment that has remained under legal or administrative hold.
Additional Advocate General Bilwadal Bhattacharya told the court that the Supreme Court’s stay applied only to Contai Municipality. Matters involving the other municipalities remained under consideration before the High Court, according to the submission reported during the hearing.
The State Election Commission’s statement that it is ready to conduct elections in November and December provides the current timetable indicated in court, but the supplied report does not specify polling dates or the complete list of municipalities scheduled to vote. The next operational step is the commission’s implementation of the court’s direction on the stored EVMs, while the legal position concerning the excluded machines and other municipalities continues to be addressed through the courts.
