Government trusts Aadhaar on welfare. It needs to rely on it to make voter lists

Why in the News

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls has stopped being a one off event. Rolling out in phases since June 2025, it now extends to almost the entire country and has already deleted over 13 crore names. The Supreme Court has upheld the exercise while holding that the final determination of citizenship belongs to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) under the Citizenship Act, 1955, and not to the Election Commission (EC). The goal of clean, accurate and inclusive rolls is not in dispute; the method is. That method revives a document intensive, house to house verification mothballed for over two decades and applies it on a near national scale, while the one question it is most often defended by, citizenship, is the question the Court has just said cannot be answered by an electoral officer at the doorstep.

What is the Special Intensive Revision?

1. What it does: It is a time bound, house to house enumeration in which Booth Level Officers (BLOs) physically visit households and verify every single voter entry.
2. How it differs from the routine revision: The annual Summary Revision updates additions, deletions and corrections against a qualifying date, while an intensive revision re verifies every entry through fresh enumeration forms and document checks.
3. Statutory basis: Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 authorises a special revision of the roll at any time, for reasons recorded in writing.
4. Procedure: The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 lay down the framework for house to house enumeration and verification.

Why does the method impose its heaviest cost on the poorest voters?

1. The burden of proof shifts to the voter: Lakhs of officials go door to door, and crores of citizens must prove their eligibility on paper within compressed deadlines.
2. Who carries that burden: It falls hardest on the poor, the elderly, migrants and women, who are the least likely to hold a continuous documentary record of themselves.
3. Welfare linkage raises the price of an error: Orders in some states link roll deletions to welfare records, so a wrongful removal can cost a family its rations and its pension.
4. Redress is slow where deletions are largest: The Supreme Court is pressing the EC over the slow disposal of appeals against deletions in West Bengal, where voters struck off are still waiting to be heard.
5. The cost recurs by design: The exercise mobilises around 10 lakh public servants, mostly schoolteachers, and costs the exchequer thousands of crores every cycle.

Why can citizenship not be settled in the field?

1. The documents are not universal: A passport is held by under 8 per cent of Indians, and was clarified in June by the Ministry of External Affairs to be a travel document rather than proof of citizenship.
2. What the common records actually prove: Aadhaar proves identity and residence by statute and not citizenship, while the voter identity card and the Permanent Account Number (PAN) prove none of it.
3. Birth registration was patchy: For decades the registration of births was incomplete for the poor, for women and for rural India.
4. The abandoned pilot: The Multipurpose National Identity Card pilot was abandoned as unworkable.
5. The Assam precedent: The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam excluded 19 lakh people, caused enormous distress and resolved nothing.
6. The register that followed counted residents: The National Population Register enumerated “usual residents”, citizens and non citizens alike, because a field test of citizenship was found impractical.

What would an Aadhaar based revision actually do?

1. The application: A voluntary application on mobile or web would let a voter link Aadhaar to the Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) and complete face authentication in one step, with no document and no visit to any office.
2. What a single authentication settles: The act proves the voter is alive, removes duplicates because each Aadhaar is unique, and removes ghosts because a non existent person cannot authenticate.
3. Age without a date of birth: Biometrics are not captured below the age of five, so a person whose fingerprints and iris were recorded in an enrolment around 2013 or earlier was at least five then and is at least 18 now.
4. Why the record has no motive to lie: Aadhaar was created as a bare identity carrying no benefit or entitlement, so nothing was gained by misstating age, and the address had to be genuine because the Aadhaar letter was posted to it.
5. Voluntariness and the residue: Linkage stays voluntary, and those who decline use the ordinary manual route, a small residue given near universal coverage.
6. Citizenship handled as the Court requires: Everyone is identified first, analytics flag the few genuine outliers, and only those are referred to the MHA.

Does the existing record of face authentication support the claim?

1. Coverage: Aadhaar covers 1.36 billion residents, making it the largest and most carefully audited enrolment in existence.
2. Proven at scale in welfare: De duplicating PAN, closing benami accounts and removing crores of ghost beneficiaries from welfare have together saved over Rs 2.7 lakh crore.
3. Face authentication at the airport gate: More than 10 crore Aadhaar face authentication transactions have been completed in Digi Yatra through more than 100 airports, with as many as 500 crore face authentications completed in all to date.
4. Face authentication for pensions: Jeevan Pramaan lets 1.47 crore pensioners prove from a phone, by their face alone, that they are alive.
5. Privacy design: Aadhaar authentication returns only a yes or no answer, and never the underlying data.

Challenges to an Aadhaar based electoral roll revision

1. It cannot answer the question the revision is defended by: Aadhaar proves residence, so it leaves citizenship exactly where the Court left it, with the MHA. Eg. The same statutory limit that disqualifies Aadhaar as proof of citizenship applies to the proposed application.
   The Fix: Separate the two tasks in law, using the application only for de duplication and proof of life, and routing citizenship doubts to a statutory MHA process carrying notice and hearing.
2. Authentication failure excludes the people it is meant to protect: Biometric and face authentication fails for manual labourers, for the elderly and where connectivity is poor, and a failure at the roll stage removes a vote rather than a ration. Eg. Ration denials following biometric authentication failure were reported in Jharkhand.
   The Fix: Make manual verification a guaranteed fallback with a statutory timeline, so no name is ever deleted on an authentication failure alone.
3. Seeding Aadhaar into rolls has been halted once already: An earlier programme was stopped on legal rather than technical grounds, and the same objection can be raised against a fresh attempt. Eg. The National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme of 2015 was halted after the Supreme Court’s interim orders restricting the use of Aadhaar.
   The Fix: Ground the application in an express statutory provision carrying defined purpose limitation, so linkage rests on law rather than on an administrative circular.
4. Deletion by analytics carries no hearing: Flagging an outlier produces an administrative suspicion the voter must then rebut, which returns the burden of proof to the individual. Eg. Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 requires individual notice before a deletion, and its observance has been contested in petitions against the current revision.
   The Fix: Require a reasoned notice, a hearing and an appeal decided within a fixed period before any flagged name is removed.
5. Privacy and proportionality: Building the electoral roll on a national biometric identity concentrates a population wide database against a constitutional right. Eg. Any state intrusion into privacy must satisfy legality, a legitimate aim and proportionality between the means and that aim.
   The Fix: Subject the application to a published proportionality assessment and to independent audit of every authentication log.

Conclusion

The revision and the alternative are not two methods for the same task. One tries to settle a legal status in the field, which the Court has already held the field cannot settle, and the other cleans the roll of the dead, the duplicated and the departed, which is the part a machine can actually do. Keeping the two apart is what would allow the roll to be cleaned without a citizenship test attached to it. The thing to watch is whether the Election Commission is given an express statutory basis for face authentication, because without one the alternative inherits the same legal fragility that stopped the last attempt.

Electoral Roll Management in India

1. One roll for all: Article 325 mandates one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency, and bars exclusion from it on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
2. Universal adult suffrage: Article 326 guarantees the vote to every citizen of 18 years and above, the age fixed by the Sixty first Amendment.
3. Who qualifies for registration: Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 requires a voter to be 18 or above and “ordinarily resident” in the constituency, while Section 16 lists the disqualifications for registration, including non citizenship.
4. The machinery: Sections 13A to 13CC set the administrative hierarchy of the Chief Electoral Officer at state level, the District Election Officer at district level and the Electoral Registration Officer at constituency level.

Government Initiatives on Electoral Roll Management

1. Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021: It permits the Electoral Registration Officer to seek a voter’s Aadhaar number on a voluntary basis, through Form 6B, to establish identity and to identify duplicate entries.
2. National Voters’ Service Portal: It allows voters to register, modify and confirm their electoral details online without visiting an office.
3. ECINET: Launched in 2026, it is a single digital interface integrating more than 40 mobile and web applications for voters and election officials.
4. Faster delivery of the identity card: A standard operating procedure requires the Electors Photo Identity Card to be delivered within 15 days of an update.

Back2Basics

1. What Aadhaar is: It is a 12 digit random number issued to a resident of India after biometric and demographic de duplication, and it establishes identity rather than citizenship.
2. Governing law: It rests on the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016.
3. Issuing authority: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is the statutory authority under that Act, functioning under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
4. Judicial limits: In K S Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2018) a five judge Constitution Bench upheld the Act and struck down Section 57, so a private entity cannot demand Aadhaar authentication under a contract.

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?”