Draft SIR list shows anomalies, absurdities. Independent audit is needed

Why in the News

An analysis of the Election Commission of India’s draft rolls finds that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has removed 13.37 crore names at the draft stage. The revision began as a pilot in Bihar, where 65 lakh names were deleted, and has since run across the country in three phases. Deletion rates have risen with each phase rather than falling. India’s electorate stood at about 98 crore at the 2024 Lok Sabha election, against an adult voting-age population of about 99 crore. The electorate is projected to fall to about 88 crore against a projected adult population of 103 crore. Either the population projection or the electoral roll is badly wrong.

What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

1. A house-to-house verification: The Special Intensive Revision is a time-bound enumeration in which Booth Level Officers visit each household and verify every existing entry on the roll.
2. Different from the annual revision: The routine summary revision only processes claims and objections that voters themselves file. The intensive revision re-verifies the entire roll on the ground.
3. The sequence: Enumeration produces a draft roll. Claims and objections against that draft are then decided before a final roll is published.

What do the national numbers show?

1. The expected final figure: Publication of a draft roll is usually followed by more additions than deletions. Final deletions are estimated at over 11.5 crore once the remaining States are counted in.
2. What is still outstanding: Draft rolls have not been released for Nagaland and Tripura. The revision has not begun in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
3. The scale against the early warning: An early projection that a nationwide revision could delete up to 10 crore names was dismissed when it was made. The draft-stage figure has already passed it.

What explains the gap between the electorate and the adult population?

1. Only two readings are available: Either the official population projection is far too high, at under 125 crore rather than the projected figure above 145 crore. Or close to 15 crore voting-age Indians are absent from the roll.
2. Correct deletions do not settle it: The pre-revision roll carried accumulated errors and spurious names, so a majority of the deletions may well be correct. A wrongful share of even one third still leaves an unacceptable number of voters removed.
3. Under-enfranchisement is the other half: Eligible voters who never appeared on the pre-revision roll, those struck off before the revision started, and young voters who should have been added during it are all outside the count. The revision was not designed to find any of them.

How have the three phases differed?

1. Phase one, Bihar: Deletions of 65 lakh amounted to a fall of under 8 per cent in the elector-to-population ratio (the electorate expressed as a share of the adult population). Judicial scrutiny brought the final figure down to 45 lakh.
2. Phase two, 13 States: Deletions reached nearly 13 per cent of the roll, totalling 6.5 crore. Public attention concentrated on the targeted removal of Muslim voters in West Bengal.
3. Phase three, the rest of the country: Deletions in the draft rolls crossed 17 per cent, totalling 6.1 crore. The phase followed a Supreme Court order that left the Commission free to proceed.
4. The direction of travel: Each phase recorded a higher deletion rate than the phase before it, and each attracted less scrutiny than the phase before it.

Which States account for the largest deletions?

1. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra lead: Uttar Pradesh recorded 2.9 crore deletions and Maharashtra 2.1 crore.
2. The next tier: Karnataka recorded 1.08 crore, Tamil Nadu 97.4 lakh, Gujarat 73.7 lakh and West Bengal 58.2 lakh.
3. Mid-sized States: Delhi recorded 47.6 lakh, Andhra Pradesh 44.9 lakh, Jharkhand 43.6 lakh, Madhya Pradesh 42.7 lakh, Rajasthan 41.9 lakh and Haryana 33.9 lakh.
4. Smaller totals: Chhattisgarh recorded 27.1 lakh, Kerala 24.1 lakh, Punjab 20.7 lakh, Odisha 20.1 lakh and Uttarakhand 8.3 lakh.
5. Where the rate is abnormal: Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Delhi recorded deletion rates well above the pattern for their phase.
6. What the table excludes: Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya and the Union Territories are left out because population projections are unavailable for them. The projections used are drawn from the Report of the Technical Group on Population Projections of July 2020.

Why are the deletion categories the core of the problem?

1. Deaths are a small and stable share: Voters marked “dead” held steady at around 3 per cent of total deletions across all three phases.
2. The two large categories are undefined: Most deletions were recorded as “absent” or “shifted”. Neither term has been defined so far, and local electoral officials have applied both at their own discretion.
3. A further fifth is flagged rather than resolved: About one-fifth of the remaining electors face further scrutiny as “unmapped” or under “logical discrepancy”. No standard operating procedure states how such a flag is to be decided.
4. The flag clusters oddly: Odisha, Jharkhand and Telangana show unusually high shares of “logical discrepancy”. A uniform software check applied across States would not produce that distribution.

What happens to a voter deleted before the revision starts?

1. No enumeration form is ever issued: A voter removed before the revision formally begins never receives an enumeration form. That removal is not counted as a revision deletion at all.
2. The scale of pre-revision removals: Over 14 lakh such deletions took place between 12 May, when the third phase schedule was announced, and the day that phase formally began. Over 8 lakh of them were in Maharashtra.
3. Delhi is the clearest case: Delhi lost more than 11 lakh voters before the revision was launched, counting from its assembly election in February the previous year. Its roll then fell from 1.56 crore to 98 lakh after the draft was published.

Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

1. The burden of proof sits on the voter: The exercise requires an elector to establish entitlement rather than requiring the state to establish ineligibility. Eg. Electors in Bihar were asked to produce legacy documents such as a parent’s entry in an earlier intensive revision roll.
   The Fix: Place the burden on the electoral registration officer to record a written ground and serve notice before any name is struck off.
2. Field officers carry unworkable targets: Verifying every household within a few weeks exceeds the staff assigned to the task. Eg. Deaths and suicides among Booth Level Officers were reported during the West Bengal phase.
   The Fix: Fix a maximum number of households per officer and extend the enumeration window instead of compressing verification into the deletion window.
3. Grievance redress runs slower than the roll: Claims and objections are decided after the deadline that freezes the roll for an approaching election. Eg. Only a fraction of the claims filed in West Bengal were disposed of before the roll was frozen.
   The Fix: Bar publication of a final roll until every claim against the draft carries a written and appealable order.
4. Deletion data is not published in usable form: Rolls are released as image files, so any independent count of deletions has to be reconstructed by hand. Eg. The national deletion total here had to be assembled State by State from separately published draft rolls.
   The Fix: Publish booth-level deletion lists carrying the recorded ground for each name, in a downloadable machine-readable format.

Conclusion

The revision was justified as a clean-up and is producing a shrinking electorate. A roll that removes names far faster than it adds them cannot be defended as an accuracy exercise, and the Commission cannot certify its own accuracy. What is contested is not whether errors existed on the old roll but whether their correction followed any stated rule. An audit by a body outside the Commission is the only thing that would settle that, and nothing in the current process provides for one.

Constitutional Framework Governing Electoral Roll Revision

1. Article 324: Vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections in the Election Commission of India.
2. Article 325: Mandates one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency and bars exclusion from it on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
3. Article 326: Provides for universal adult suffrage, with the voting age lowered to 18 by the Sixty-first Amendment.
4. Article 327: Empowers Parliament to legislate on all matters relating to elections, including the preparation of electoral rolls.
5. Article 329: Bars courts from questioning an electoral law or a completed election except through an election petition.

Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Roll Revision

1. Representation of the People Act, 1950: Provides for the allocation of seats and for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.
2. Section 19: Sets the conditions for registration, being 18 years of age and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
3. Section 21: Authorises the Commission to order a special revision of a roll at any time, for reasons recorded in writing.
4. Section 16: Lists the disqualifications for registration, including non-citizenship and unsoundness of mind.
5. Section 31: Penalises a false declaration made in connection with the preparation or revision of a roll.
6. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Lay down the procedure for house-to-house enumeration, publication of the draft roll, and disposal of claims and objections.
7. Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the conduct of elections and confines a challenge to a completed election to an election petition before the High Court.

Government Initiatives for Electoral Roll Management

1. ECINET: A single digital interface launched in 2026 that consolidates more than 40 separate Commission applications used by voters and officials.
2. National Voters’ Services Portal: Allows a voter to register, correct and verify roll details online without visiting a registration centre.
3. Electors Photo Identity Card delivery standard: A revised operating procedure requires an updated identity card to reach the elector within 15 days of an update.
4. Common electoral roll proposal: A single roll for parliamentary, assembly and local body elections, intended to end the parallel rolls maintained separately by State Election Commissions.

Key Facts about Electoral Roll Revision

1. National Voters’ Day: Observed on 25 January each year, marking the founding of the Election Commission in 1950.
2. Frequency of intensive revision: An intensive revision of this kind has been carried out about 14 times, with earlier rounds in 1983, 1995, 2002 and 2004.
3. The first rolls: The first intensive revisions ran between 1952 and 1956 to build the country’s first reliable voter database.
4. Qualifying dates: Since the 2021 amendment to the election laws, a person turning 18 may register with reference to any of four qualifying dates in a year, 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October.

Way Forward

1. Link the roll to the civil registration system: Automatic removal of deceased electors through the death register would take the largest legitimate deletion category out of field discretion entirely.
2. Permanent electoral tribunals: A standing tribunal for roll disputes would replace the temporary appellate arrangements assembled around each revision.
3. Geo-tagged field verification: Recording each house visit with a location and time stamp would make a claimed visit checkable after the fact.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026, GS2, 10 marks] Is the right to vote a fundamental right? Discuss the position of the Election Commission of India while undertaking the revision of electoral rolls. Can it also examine the question of citizenship of voters?”