The Bombay High Court on Thursday, November 5, ordered the Election Commission of India (ECI) to include the names of members of a Goa family that were deleted from the final voter list during the recently concluded Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Goa, LiveLaw reported. PTI also reported the order the same day.

Source: LiveLaw

A division bench of Justice Valmiki Menezes and Justice Amit Jamsandekar said, as reported by LiveLaw: "We allow the petition... We have rejected the contention of the ECI that the hearing in the present plea be deferred as the issue of SIR is pending before the Supreme Court.... This is not pertaining to SIR... We therefore ordered the BLO of Santacruz Constituency (in Goa) to add the names of the petitioners within a period of 10 days from today."

The bench refused to stay the operation of its order for two weeks, as requested by the ECI, LiveLaw reported. A detailed copy of the order is awaited. The case is Paresh Salgaonkar vs State of Goa, Writ Petition 732 of 2026.

The plea was filed by the Salgaonkar family, which said their names had been dropped from the draft electoral roll despite them filing a Form 8 — the form used by an existing voter to change address — after shifting to another house within the same Santa Cruz assembly constituency. The ECI maintained that under the SIR guidelines it was compulsory for a voter to submit a pre-filled enumeration form along with Form 8, and that because the petitioners refused to submit the enumeration form, they were asked to fill in Form 6, which is meant for fresh inclusion in the voter list.

At earlier hearings in October, the same bench had questioned the ECI sharply, holding that a draft SIR roll cannot be used to delete existing voters' names and that an administrative software system cannot override the statutory framework governing electoral rolls, LawTrend reported. The petitioners had said that when their Form 8 applications were processed, the ERONET system could not find records matching their Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPICs), leaving officials only the option to reject the applications, and that they were later told their EPICs had already been deleted from the rolls. The bench had asked the ECI to identify the legal provision that authorised deleting an elector's name without a hearing.

Source: LawTrend

With Thursday's order, the family's names are to be restored within 10 days. The wider SIR exercise remains contested, with the ECI itself telling the High Court that the issue of SIR is pending before the Supreme Court.