Why in the News
Electoral roll revision is moving from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR)‘s mapping and “logical discrepancy” checks back to enrolment on the original Form 6, the voter application form, without the ancestry declaration. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has announced a special summary revision (SSR) in 17 States and Union Territories, with a drive to re-enrol those “left out”, an implicit admission of the SIR’s flaws.
What is a summary revision, and how does the special drive differ from the SIR?
- What it is: A summary revision is the routine annual update of electoral rolls, adding new electors and removing dead or shifted ones. It is like refreshing a club’s membership list rather than rebuilding it.
- Legal basis: Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 provides for the revision of rolls.
- Stalled by the SIR: The exercise was halted last year during the SIR, a document based rebuild of the rolls. It resumes with January 1, 2027 as the qualifying date, by which applicants must turn eighteen.
- Checks dropped: The drive drops mapping, which linked each voter to an older roll, and the discrepancy checks. The ECI thereby concedes that the SIR did not need them.
- The takeaway: By returning to routine methods, the ECI is undoing the very hurdles that removed voters during the SIR.
What do the new measures concede about the SIR?
- Cap on objections: The ECI has capped Form 7 objections, used to seek deletion of a name, after reports of bulk filings in several States.
- Searchable rolls: Parties and candidates will get rolls as searchable text PDFs, so wrongful deletions are easier to trace.
- Repair before polls: Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand, voting early next year, can repair truncated rolls, re-enrolling wrongly deleted voters and adding new ones without quasi-citizenship tests that asked voters to prove their eligibility.
What remains unresolved where States have already voted on SIR rolls?
- West Bengal backlog: Appellate tribunals have disposed of barely 3% of 38 lakh appeals against deletion.
- High restoration rate: Deleted electors filed 22 lakh of these appeals, and tribunals restored electors in 93% of cases decided.
- Unclear route for appellants: The ECI has not said whether they can use the new drive, or what becomes of the tribunals.
- Bihar’s missing women: Bihar’s roll gender ratio, women electors per thousand men, fell from 907 in the last Lok Sabha rolls to 892 after the SIR. Young married women struck off must be allowed to re-enrol.
- Supreme Court’s role: The Supreme Court upheld the SIR in May and is now hearing petitions on West Bengal, Delhi and the Commission’s conduct. It should ensure genuine voters are reinstated.
Are correctives enough without accountability?
- Burden on the elector: The ECI’s own 2002-03 guidelines did not shift the burden of proving eligibility onto the elector, and future intensive revisions should return to them.
- Role of protest: The corrective steps owe much to sustained protests against the SIR.
- Dissent within the ECI: The two Election Commissioners objected on record to decisions of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), and their questions remain unanswered.
- Appointment dispute: Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India (2023) set a selection panel for election commissioners that included the Chief Justice of India. Parliament replaced it by law, and a two judge Bench split on that law last month.
- Call for resignation: The CEC who presided over the flawed process, Gyanesh Kumar, should resign.
Challenges
- Time before polls: The SSR runs only months before elections in three States, leaving little time to find deleted voters.
- Awareness among the deleted: Many struck off voters, especially migrants and married women who moved, do not know they were removed.
- Field staff load: Booth level officers (BLOs), who make the house visits, are stretched after back to back revisions.
Way Forward
- Separate reporting: The ECI should report re-enrolments after deletion separately from fresh enrolments.
- Visits, not forms: The drive’s house-to-house visits should do the work, so the burden does not fall on electors again.
- Clear route for appeals: The ECI should say whether West Bengal’s appellants can use the drive and what happens to the tribunals.
Conclusion
The ECI’s correctives can repair the rolls from here on, but they do not account for voters already struck off or for the decisions that struck them off. Whether the Supreme Court restores deleted voters in States that have voted, and how the dispute over appointing election commissioners is settled, is what to watch.
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?”
