CEO Bengal website with SIR data moves to new domain

Kolkata: The CEO West Bengal website, where one can access their Bengal Special Intensive Revision (SIR) rolls, migrated from its earlier URL https://ceowestbengal.nic.in to https://ceowestbengal.wb.gov.in on Friday.The migration from the NIC domain to the wb.gov domain comes with more features and faster accessibility. "The website is more user-friendly," claimed the office of the chief electoral officer, West Bengal. Voters can find their names in the electoral roll of 2002 (SIR list) by searching through districts, assembly constituencies, and polling station names of that year.Bengal chief electoral officer Manoj Agarwal said the shift of domain is due to the MeitY policy. "Upgradation of existing NIC servers is on, and MeitY has asked entities other than the central govt entities to shift from NIC to their own servers," he added.Since the electoral roll of 2002 is being uploaded on the CEO's website, many glitches have been reported by voters and political parties. Complaints like missing polling booths and the site being down most times of the day have been reported. The number of complaints rose significantly since the ECI announced the SIR schedule for West Bengal on Monday. Many people complained that they could not even open the site to check their names on the SIR list of 2002.NIC has its own data centres in several places, including Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, and Guwahati. The office of the CEO West Bengal had its data depository in the Delhi data centre of NIC, and from there, it hosted its site until recently. Earlier, no charge was required for using the NIC data centre. However, from 2018, the NIC started to charge for providing the service."West Bengal govt has its own data centre, which was upgraded in 2024. The state also does not charge the user for using the data centre. So, it is economical to shift the ceowestbengal site from the NIC data centre to the state govt-owned data centre. And it is logical, too, as the data depository remains in the state instead of Delhi," a senior state govt official, who is privy to the development, said.The entire maintenance cost of the office of the chief electoral officer, West Bengal, including staff salary and other expenditure, is borne by the state govt. Only the election-related expenditure is borne by the Election Commission of India.