Question (2018, GS2): “In the light of recent controversy regarding the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), what are the challenges before the Election Commission of India to ensure the trustworthiness of elections in India? Linkage: The core of the current news is the concern over potential wrongful disenfranchisement vs. genuine roll clean-up. When the ECI implements large-scale deletions (up to 50% in some urban constituencies) without releasing verifiable metrics like the elector-to-population ratio, it creates a transparency deficit. This directly mirrors the challenge of maintaining public trust in the electoral process, similar to the EVM debate.
Mentor Comment:
The Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has struck off nearly a fifth of the electoral rolls in Telangana and Karnataka, about 22 per cent and 19.5 per cent respectively, with some Bengaluru and Hyderabad constituencies losing more than 40 to 50 per cent of their electors. The revision has proceeded after the Supreme Court of India permitted the SIR process to continue, and follows the Bihar SIR, where the Court had questioned why political parties filed so few objections to wrongful deletions. The Commission has not published the elector-to-population ratio, the only test of under-enrolment, for any state during the revision, making it impossible to verify whether the deletions reflect genuine bloat or wrongful disenfranchisement.
What is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR)?
What it is: The SIR is an intensive revision of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission of India, distinct from its routine summary revision process.
How it works: It places the onus on electors and political parties to file objections against wrongful deletions.
Its template: The Bihar SIR set the process the Commission has since extended to other states, including Telangana and Karnataka.
What does the scale of deletions in Telangana and Karnataka show?
High deletion rates: Telangana lost about 22 per cent and Karnataka about 19.5 per cent of electoral roll names, among the highest deletion rates in the country.
Sharpest cuts in capital cities: Five Bengaluru constituencies lost more than half their electors, and nine of Hyderabad’s 15 constituencies saw deletions of more than 40 per cent.
Implausible as genuine bloat: Both states have high net in-migration from the rest of India, and a deletion is justified only if the elector left the state altogether, since a move within the state would only relocate a name on the same roll rather than remove it.
Why is the Commission’s justification hard to verify?
Mandatory ratio withheld: The Commission has not published the elector-to-population ratio for any state during the revision, though doing so is mandatory and is the only test of under-enrolment.
Opaque data release: Karnataka’s Chief Electoral Officer has not released a gender-wise breakdown of deletions and has scattered lists across Google Drive links without the old booth numbers, making verification difficult.
A precedent of wrongful exclusion: A similar “logical discrepancy” process in West Bengal disenfranchised lakhs of electors; a Right to Information request found barely 82,000 of nearly 38 lakh appeals before 19 tribunals had been decided months after the state’s elections, with more than 90 per cent of decided appeals restoring the elector.
Challenges to the SIR process
Onus on electors invites under-objection: Requiring electors and parties to actively contest wrongful deletions means low awareness and the infrequent use of a voter identity card lead to few objections being filed. Eg. During the Bihar SIR, the Supreme Court itself asked why political parties had filed so few objections. Fix. Shift the burden to the Commission by requiring it to proactively verify a deletion against updated residence or migration data before finalising it.
Opacity defeats verification: Withholding the elector-to-population ratio and publishing deletion lists without booth numbers or gender breakdowns prevents independent scrutiny of whether cuts are justified. Eg. The Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer scattered deletion lists across Google Drive links without old booth numbers. Fix. Mandate publication of the elector-to-population ratio and a standardised, booth-wise deletion list for every state before a revision is finalised.
Conclusion
Unless the Commission publishes the verification data it is required to release, the scale of the Telangana and Karnataka deletions will remain unexplained, and the West Bengal experience suggests a substantial share of those struck off may eventually prove to have been wrongly excluded.
Draft electoral rolls released after the enumeration phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), an exercise conducted by the Election Commission to verify every elector afresh rather than only updating additions and deletions, show wide variation in the reasons recorded for deleting names in Karnataka and Telangana. Both states saw roughly one-fifth of their electors deleted, the highest share among major states. A reason-wise breakdown of the deletions shows extreme, inconsistent use of the two largest deletion categories, “Shifted” and “Absent”, across constituencies of comparable size. The Election Commission has not defined when a Booth-level Officer (BLO) should mark an elector “Shifted” rather than “Absent”, and has never published the break-up between the two categories.
What do the numbers show?
No defined threshold between categories: The Election Commission’s Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2023 states that a person absent temporarily from their ordinary residence does not, by law, cease to be ordinarily resident there, which raises the question of whether an elector found “Absent” during enumeration should be deleted at all. The manual gives BLOs no rule for choosing between “Shifted” and “Absent”.
Wide swings between similar constituencies in Telangana: Of 1,79,510 deletions in Jubilee Hills, 83% were marked “Shifted” and only 15,000 “Absent”. In the comparably sized Nizamabad (Urban), 50,307 of 83,282 deletions were marked “Absent”. In Nakrekal (SC), all 20,169 deletions were marked as reasons other than “Absent”, with not a single elector recorded as absent.
Wide swings in Karnataka: In Hebbal, 87% of 1.3 lakh deletions were marked “Shifted” and only 287 “Absent”. In Hubli-Dharwad-East, roughly 25,000 of 47,000 deletions were marked “Absent”. In Bommanahalli, 2.65 lakh electors, 54.8% of the roll, were deleted, with only about 9,700 marked deceased.
Aggregated official reporting hides the pattern: The Election Commission has only ever published a combined figure for “Shifted” and “Absent” deletions in every state where the SIR has run. The category-wise breakdown used in this analysis was derived independently by processing thousands of constituency-level deletion lists.
Conclusion
The scale of variation in reason-coding for deletions, without a defined rule separating “Shifted” from “Absent”, points to inconsistent application rather than a uniformly applied enumeration standard. The Election Commission has not made public a category-wise breakdown for any SIR state, leaving independent verification as the only route to auditing how deletions are being classified.
Back2Basics: Special Intensive Revision (SIR)
SIR is a full re-verification of the electoral roll, requiring every elector to be freshly enumerated, unlike the routine annual “Summary Revision” that only processes additions, deletions and corrections against the existing roll.
Deletions during SIR are coded under four broad reasons: Shifted (or Permanently Shifted), Absent, Deceased and Duplicate.
“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
An editorial criticises the Election Commission of India for allowing large-scale, allegedly fraudulent Form 7 deletion applications to be filed during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. Form 7 is the prescribed form under electoral roll rules for objecting to another person’s inclusion on the roll or seeking their deletion. Large volumes of such applications, filed in bulk and allegedly by parties with no direct connection to the individual voters concerned, raise the concern that a mechanism meant for genuine, individual objections is instead being used as a tool to strike names off the roll at scale, without the safeguards a genuine objection process would apply.
Why is bulk filing of Form 7 applications a concern?
Form 7 was designed for individual, evidence-backed objections: The form allows any registered elector to object to another entry on the roll, but the process assumes each objection is filed on a specific, documented ground by someone with knowledge of that particular voter’s circumstances.
Bulk filing bypasses the individual-knowledge assumption: Reports of large batches of Form 7 applications filed together, in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, suggest a coordinated filing exercise rather than genuine, case-by-case objections raised by people with actual knowledge of each voter.
No standard operating procedure to screen bulk filings: The Election Commission has not published a standard operating procedure specifying how a Booth Level Officer or Electoral Registration Officer should treat an unusually large batch of objections filed from a single source or in a short window, leaving field-level officials to process each one individually regardless of the pattern.
Risk of disenfranchisement without adequate verification: A voter whose name is objected to through a bulk-filed Form 7 may be removed from the roll on a ground that was never actually verified against that specific individual’s circumstances, if the volume of filings overwhelms the verification capacity at the local level.
What safeguard does the editorial call for?
A standard operating procedure for anomalous filing patterns: The editorial’s central demand is a documented, uniform procedure specifying how Electoral Registration Officers must treat Form 7 applications filed in unusually large batches or from a common source, rather than processing every filing as an ordinary individual objection.
Verification against the objected voter, not just the objector’s paperwork: A functioning safeguard would require direct verification with the individual whose name is objected to before any deletion is finalised, rather than relying solely on the documentation the objecting party submits.
Conclusion
The editorial’s concern is that the Special Intensive Revision, meant to correct genuine errors in the electoral roll, is vulnerable to being used to strike voters off the roll at scale through a bulk-filed, individually-framed objection form that field officials are not equipped to screen. A published standard operating procedure for anomalous Form 7 filing patterns is the specific safeguard the editorial says is missing.
Back2Basics: Form 7
The prescribed form under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 for objecting to the inclusion of a name in the electoral roll, or seeking the deletion of an entry on stated grounds such as death or shift of residence.
Can be filed by any registered elector against another entry on the same roll, not only by the individual whose own entry is in question.
Processed by the local Electoral Registration Officer, who is required to give the affected voter an opportunity to be heard before a name is deleted.
Became a point of controversy during the 2026 Special Intensive Revision after reports of large-volume, bulk filings in several States.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
A data analysis of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) draft rolls shows Telangana recorded the highest deletion rate of any State, at 21.7 percent, concentrated heavily in Hyderabad’s urban assembly constituencies. The analysis also flags a shift in the gender ratio of the deleted rolls, a pattern that raises the question of whether urban migration and residential churn, rather than uniform electoral-roll error, is driving Telangana’s outlier deletion rate.
What does the deletion pattern in Telangana show?
Telangana’s 21.7 percent deletion rate is the national outlier: No other State’s SIR draft rolls recorded as high a share of entries deleted as Telangana’s 21.7 percent, making it the sharpest single data point to emerge from the SIR exercise so far.
Deletions cluster in Hyderabad’s urban assembly constituencies: The deletion rate is not evenly spread across Telangana; it concentrates disproportionately in the assembly constituencies that make up Hyderabad and its adjoining urban belt.
Gender ratio shifts within the deleted rolls: The analysis flags a change in the male-to-female ratio among deleted entries compared with the surviving roll, suggesting the deletions are not gender-neutral in their incidence.
Why would an urban belt like Hyderabad see such a high deletion rate?
High residential churn in a metro labour market: Hyderabad’s urban constituencies see high rates of migration for work, with residents frequently changing addresses within the city or moving in and out of it, a pattern the SIR’s Shifted category is specifically designed to capture.
Rental housing turnover complicates address verification: A large share of Hyderabad’s urban population lives in rented accommodation with shorter tenancies than owner-occupied housing, making door-to-door verification more likely to find an address where the previously registered voter no longer lives.
Duplicate registration risk from repeated internal migration: Voters who moved within Hyderabad, or into it from elsewhere in Telangana, without formally updating their electoral roll entry each time, are more likely to end up registered more than once, feeding the Duplicate category of the ASDDO framework.
Conclusion
Telangana’s 21.7 percent deletion rate, concentrated in Hyderabad’s urban constituencies, is consistent with the residential churn that a fast-growing metro labour market produces, though the gender-ratio shift in the deleted rolls is a pattern that needs its own explanation before the deletion rate can be read as a purely administrative correction. The final roll, after the objection window closes, will show how much of the 21.7 percent survives scrutiny.
Back2Basics: ASDDO categorisation
The five-category framework, Additional, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead, and Objected, the Election Commission uses to classify every entry removed during a Special Intensive Revision.
“Shifted” covers voters found to have moved residence since their last registration, the category most directly linked to urban migration patterns.
“Duplicate” covers voters registered more than once, often from repeated, unrecorded address changes.
The categorisation is meant to make each deletion auditable against a specific, stated ground rather than an unexplained removal.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
The Election Commission of India’s draft electoral rolls under the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) show 1.07 crore names removed from Karnataka’s electoral rolls, shrinking the State’s registered electorate to 4.46 crore. Discrepancy notices have been issued to affected voters, and the deletions have been categorised under the ASDDO framework: Additional, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead, and Objected entries. Opposition parties have flagged the ASDDO categorisation as opaque, arguing that voters cannot easily determine which specific ground led to their own name being struck off.
What is the Special Intensive Revision, and what has it found in Karnataka?
A door-to-door re-verification of the electoral roll: The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is the Election Commission’s mechanism for a fresh, ground-level re-verification of every entry on a State’s electoral roll, distinct from the routine annual summary revision.
1.07 crore names deleted from Karnataka’s rolls: The draft rolls published under the SIR remove 1.07 crore entries from Karnataka’s electoral list, a reduction large enough to shrink the State’s registered electorate to 4.46 crore.
Deletions grouped under five ASDDO categories: Every deleted entry is classified as Additional (a duplicate registration elsewhere), Shifted (moved residence), Duplicate (registered more than once), Dead (deceased), or Objected (formally objected to by another party), the ASDDO framework the Election Commission uses to justify each deletion.
Discrepancy notices issued to affected voters: Voters whose names were flagged for possible deletion have been sent discrepancy notices, intended to give them a chance to respond before the final roll is published.
Why is the ASDDO categorisation being called opaque?
No voter-level breakdown published against each category: Opposition parties argue that the aggregate 1.07 crore figure is not accompanied by a transparent, checkable breakdown showing how many entries fall under each of the five ASDDO categories, making it difficult to assess whether deletions are concentrated in a particular category prone to error.
Individual voters cannot easily verify their own category: A voter who finds their name removed has limited means to determine which of the five categories was applied to their specific entry, or to see the evidence behind that categorisation, before the final roll is locked in.
Scale of deletion invites scrutiny of the underlying process: A reduction of over a crore names is large enough, relative to Karnataka’s total electorate, that opposition parties are asking whether the field verification exercise behind the SIR was itself uniformly rigorous or prone to erroneous deletions in specific segments.
Conclusion
Karnataka’s SIR draft rolls have removed 1.07 crore names and issued discrepancy notices to affected voters, but the opacity around the ASDDO breakdown leaves the accuracy of that large a deletion unverifiable from outside the Election Commission’s own process. The final electoral roll, after voters respond to the discrepancy notices, will determine how many of the 1.07 crore deletions are contested and reversed before the list is locked.
Back2Basics: Special Intensive Revision (SIR)
A ground-level, door-to-door re-verification of a State’s entire electoral roll conducted by the Election Commission of India under its powers over roll preparation under the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
Distinct from the routine annual Summary Revision, which updates the existing roll rather than re-verifying every entry from scratch.
Uses Booth Level Officers to physically verify voter details house by house before publishing a draft roll for public objections.
Has drawn political controversy in multiple States over the scale of deletions and the transparency of the verification process behind them.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
Former diplomat Navdeep Suri has raised concerns over the process of establishing citizenship during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Punjab. He was issued a notice by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and asked to produce documents after discrepancies were flagged between his current details and his details in the 2003 electoral roll. Suri stated that he was not in India in 2003 and was posted at the Indian High Commission in London, so he did not participate in the SIR of that year, and that officials have therefore asked for his passport as proof. The Punjab Chief Electoral Officer has stated that his name was never removed and is part of the draft electoral roll published on 13 August 2026. The case turns on whether an elector absent from the 2003 roll can be required to establish citizenship afresh, and on what documents satisfy that requirement.
What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?
The exercise itself: A Special Intensive Revision is a house-to-house verification of every entry in an electoral roll, conducted against a stated earlier roll used as the reference base. It differs from a summary revision, which only processes fresh claims and objections.
The reference roll in this round: The 2003 electoral roll is being used as the base against which current entries are mapped in Punjab. An elector mapped to a 2003 entry is carried forward without further documentation.
What happens when mapping fails: An elector not mapped in the 2003 SIR receives a notice from the Electoral Registration Officer and is asked to submit documents. The Booth Level Officer, the field official who maintains a polling station’s roll, delivers the notice and collects the response.
The stated purpose: The revision is intended to remove deceased electors, duplicate entries and shifted electors from the roll. The 2025 round covered 12 States and over 51 crore electors.
Why did a former ambassador receive a notice?
The 2003 mapping gap: His current details did not match his details in the 2003 electoral roll. The mismatch, not any allegation against him, generated the notice.
The reason for the gap: He was not in India in 2003 and was serving at the Indian High Commission in London at the time. He did not participate in the SIR conducted in that year.
The document then demanded: Officials asked for his passport as proof once he explained his absence. Documents he had uploaded in 2026 did not match his 2003 details.
The procedural sequence he described: He was told to come and collect the notice from the Booth Level Officer. He was then to return with documents establishing that he is an Indian citizen, and the documents required were not specified at the point of the first instruction.
His stated position: He holds documents other than a voter identity card and an Aadhaar card. He asked what the position of a common citizen would be where a person who represented India in three countries had trouble establishing citizenship.
What did the Election Commission say in response?
On removal: The Punjab Chief Electoral Officer stated that his name was never removed from the roll. It is part of the draft electoral roll published on 13 August 2026.
On his registration: His vote was registered in Amritsar and continues to be registered there. No change of constituency was involved at any stage.
On why the notice issued: He received a notice and was asked to submit documents because he was not mapped in the 2003 SIR. The trigger was the mapping gap rather than a challenge to his entry.
On the outcome: His name was published as part of the electoral roll after the documents were received. The process concluded in his favour.
On the standing of the draft roll: Publication in the draft roll on 13 August 2026 preserved his entry throughout the notice period. A notice under the revision does not by itself delete an entry.
What does the case suggest about the burden on ordinary electors?
Documentary burden falls on the elector: The revision places the obligation to produce proof on the person whose entry failed to map, not on the officer who flagged the mismatch. An elector without a document trail from 2003 has no way to discharge it.
Absence abroad becomes a defect in the record: A person outside India in 2003 could not have been enumerated in that year’s roll. The design treats that absence as a discrepancy requiring citizenship proof rather than as an expected gap.
The document list was not specified upfront: The elector was asked to return with unspecified documents showing Indian citizenship. Discretion over which document satisfies the requirement sits with the field officer.
Uploaded records did not close the gap: Documents uploaded in 2026 did not match the 2003 details and did not resolve the flag. Digital submission therefore did not substitute for the passport eventually demanded.
The professional case is the favourable case: A former ambassador holds a passport, service records and multiple identity documents. An elector whose only records are a voter identity card and an Aadhaar card, both of which the revision does not accept as proof of citizenship, faces the same demand with fewer means to meet it.
Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision
Citizenship determination sits outside the electoral machinery’s competence: The ECI registers electors under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and does not adjudicate citizenship, which the Citizenship Act, 1955 governs. Eg. Field officers are asking electors to produce documents that show they are Indian citizens. Fix. Confine the revision to residence and identity verification and refer genuine citizenship doubts to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
The reference roll excludes a whole class of electors: Anyone absent from the 2003 roll for legitimate reasons carries the documentary burden of the entire exercise. Eg. An elector posted abroad in diplomatic service in 2003 was flagged and asked for a passport. Fix. Publish an exhaustive and binding list of alternative documents in advance, with a stated procedure for electors with no 2003 entry.
Selective disenfranchisement allegations follow the exercise: Concentrated deletions in particular areas invite the charge that the revision falls unevenly across communities. Eg. Opposition parties have alleged selective disenfranchisement in the States covered by the 2025 revision. Fix. Publish constituency-wise deletion and addition data with stated reasons, on a fixed schedule, so the pattern is auditable.
Booth level capacity is the binding constraint: A house-to-house verification at the coverage the 2025 round reached rests on field officers holding other full-time posts. Eg. Booth Level Officers are drawn from teaching and revenue staff and handle notice delivery alongside their regular duties. Fix. Create a dedicated cadre of full-time roll verification staff for the duration of each revision, with a fixed elector-to-officer ratio.
The appeal window is short relative to the burden: An elector must locate decades-old documents inside the claims and objections period fixed for the draft roll. Eg. In the Bihar revision of 2025 the draft roll was published on 1 August with claims and objections closing on 1 September, a single month in which an elector had to trace decades-old records. Fix. Extend the objection period where an elector has been served a notice, and require a written speaking order before any deletion.
Conclusion
An intensive revision that uses the 2003 electoral roll as its reference base converts the absence of a 2003 entry into a demand for proof of citizenship, and that demand fell on a former ambassador who was posted abroad in that year. The Election Commission’s response, recorded above, disputes the fact of removal rather than the documentary burden the process places on the elector. The unresolved question is what an elector with no 2003 entry and no passport is expected to produce. The next milestone is the disposal of claims and objections against the draft roll and the publication of the final Punjab roll.
“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
Tribunals in West Bengal are struggling to handle the caseload thrown up by the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and every State running the exercise is reporting rising numbers of electors marked “absent”, “shifted”, “dead” and “duplicate”. The Supreme Court settled the legal question in Association for Democratic Reforms and Others v. Election Commission of India and Others (May 2026). That ruling upheld the Election Commission of India’s power to conduct the revision. It also recorded the Court’s satisfaction with the procedure the Commission adopted, holding the deletions to be within the parameters of that procedure. The contest is now over whether a constitutional court that declines to scrutinise an electoral authority is protecting institutional autonomy or removing the only check available to an elector who has been struck off.
What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?
A house to house verification, not a paper update: SIR is a time bound enumeration of the whole roll. Booth Level Officers physically visit every household to verify each entry on it.
It differs from the routine revision: The annual Summary Revision works off claims and objections filed by electors. SIR re-verifies every single existing entry.
Its stated objects: It removes deceased, duplicate and permanently shifted entries, registers newly eligible electors, and extends high security Electors Photo Identity Cards to full coverage.
It is periodic, not novel: Intensive revisions were first run between 1952 and 1956, and India has conducted roughly fourteen such exercises, including those of 1983, 1995, 2002 and 2004.
What did the Court actually hold in the SIR case?
The power was affirmed: The judgment upholds the Commission’s authority to conduct an intensive revision of the rolls.
The procedure was endorsed: The Court recorded its satisfaction with the procedure the Commission adopted, rather than testing that procedure against outcomes.
The deletions were validated collectively: Deletions were held to fall within the parameters of the approved procedure, which forecloses an individual challenge on the ground that the procedure itself is defective.
Which of the two available approaches did the Court choose?
The first option was structured suspicion: The Court could have adopted scepticism towards the Commission’s claims of authority, on the view that judicial vigilance is needed to hold the balance between asserted state power and citizens’ rights.
The second option was institutional trust: It could instead repose trust in another constitutional authority, on the assumption that constitutional institutions are themselves sufficiently committed to protecting citizens’ rights, making intensive scrutiny unnecessary.
It took the second: The judgment rests on the premise that a constitutional body does not need to be watched, which is precisely the premise a rights challenge exists to test.
Rights are lost by practice, not only by intent: An authority can undermine citizens’ rights without any explicit intention to do so, simply through unreasonable practices applied at scale.
Trust tests motive, scrutiny tests effect: A court satisfied that a body means well never reaches the question of what the body’s method actually produces on the ground.
The error is not isolated: It sits inside a broader contemporary judicial tendency that increasingly privileges “authority” over the citizen asserting a right against it.
How does the ruling fail the principle of representation?
Representation was the missing anchor: The judgment is not anchored in the foundational principle underlying the controversy, which is representation, so the logic of representation did not inform how the Commission’s authority was read.
Inclusion is now a defining requirement of citizenship: As democracy has evolved and the idea of citizenship has expanded, full inclusion has become one of its central requirements.
The requirement runs in two directions: Citizenship must not be denied or diminished on grounds such as sex, religion, race, caste or class, and political representation is not meaningful if citizens are effectively disabled from participating in elections as voters.
The arithmetic follows: Leaving eligible electors out of an election inevitably produces flawed representation, whatever the quality of the procedure that excluded them.
Can a power to purify the rolls be exercised without becoming a power to exclude?
The power was accepted without its limit: Having accepted that the Commission may prepare rolls and examine whether a person is genuinely entitled to be on them, the Court did not ensure that this power of scrutiny stops short of excluding or harassing eligible voters.
The default duty runs the other way: In a democratic election the Commission’s first responsibility is to include, not to exclude, and a verification drive inverts that default by design.
The Commission was not seized of inclusion: Nothing in the record shows the Commission asking whether its verification drive keeps eligible electors on the roll.
The instrument turns on its purpose: Without a stated inclusion duty, the revision becomes a hatchet rather than a purifying procedure.
Who bears the cost of a documentation based test of eligibility?
Exclusion is not random in practice: The state’s exclusion operates randomly as a general rule, but a documentation regime used as evidence of citizenship does not fall evenly.
The exposed groups are identifiable in advance: Vast numbers of women, the poor and the marginalised are particularly vulnerable to being trapped by such regimes, both as a matter of theory and as an empirical reality.
The democratic cost is the endpoint: A disproportionate exclusion of these groups undermines democratic representation itself, not merely the individual entitlements of those removed.
What happens to a citizen after the name is deleted?
The verdict routes deletions to the executive: It directs the Commission to report to the Home Ministry the names of persons whose entries have been deleted, for further adjudication of their claims.
The exercise acquires a second use: That direction allows the Commission and the government to weaponise the revision, pushing individuals into a zone of doubt, suspicion and harassment.
A cautious judgment produced an expansive institution: A ruling anxious not to enter the Commission’s domain has obliquely enabled the Commission to transcend that domain and become enmeshed with executive authority.
The consequences run past the vote: The exercise may end by creating a class of shifted, absent and duplicate persons pushed to the margins of formal existence, with passports and claims to welfare schemes also cast into doubt.
Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision
Booth level staff are set impossible targets: Verification of every entry within a compressed window is loaded onto officers who already hold full time teaching or clerical posts. Eg. Booth Level Officers in West Bengal reported acute duty stress during the current cycle, including cases of suicide. Fix. Cap the number of entries assigned per officer per day and pay a separate verification honorarium tied to that cap.
Legacy document requirements exclude the undocumented: Asking for a birth certificate or an ancestral roll entry disqualifies people whose births were never registered. Eg. Civil registration of births was far from universal in the birth cohorts now in their fifties and sixties. Fix. Accept a widened evidence set including electricity bills, ration cards and community certificates, with a declaration by the Booth Level Officer as a residual proof.
Grievance redress does not keep pace with deletions: Claims and objections pile up faster than hearing officers can dispose of them, so the roll freezes with the disputes unresolved. Eg. Only a fraction of the roughly six million claims filed in West Bengal were disposed of before the poll freeze. Fix. Constitute standing appellate tribunals for electoral rolls that sit year round rather than temporary benches raised at revision time.
Field marking is subjective: A single officer decides on one visit whether an elector is “shifted” or “absent”, with no second visit and no corroboration requirement. Eg. Households locked at the time of a daytime visit are routinely marked absent. Fix. Mandate geotagged evidence of at least two visits at different times of day before any absence marking is recorded.
Manual capture introduces avoidable error: Offline field data is later keyed into the database by hand, so transcription mistakes enter the roll after verification has finished. Eg. Name and age mismatches between the field form and the uploaded entry are a recurring source of objections. Fix. Issue tablets with offline forms that sync directly, removing the separate data entry step.
Fear of a citizenship screen suppresses cooperation: Residents who read the exercise as a covert citizenship test refuse to produce documents, which raises the very deletion risk they fear. Eg. Households in border districts have declined to hand over papers during roll verification. Fix. Print on the enumeration form itself that the exercise determines electoral registration only and creates no finding on nationality.
Conclusion
The exclusions now surfacing across States are not an administrative accident sitting downstream of a sound legal position. They follow from the judicial choice set out above, and from the direction routing deleted names to the executive for further adjudication. What remains unresolved is whether a court will accept that a power to verify carries a matching duty to include, because until it does, the elector who is struck off has a procedure to follow and no forum that will ask whether the procedure was reasonable.
“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
The United States President’s appreciation of India’s election mechanism, and his social media post citing India’s Chief Election Commissioner on how the United States conducts elections without a valid photo identity, has put election integrity in both democracies under simultaneous scrutiny. Both political systems agree that rolls should be clean and voting should be verified, and disagree completely on who the requirement is meant to exclude.
What is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls?
Definition:Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is a comprehensive, time bound house to house verification drive involving fresh enumeration forms for all voters, door to door verification by Booth Level Officers, document verification of citizenship, deletion of ineligible entries and inclusion of omitted voters.
How it differs from the routine exercise:Summary Revision is the routine annual update of additions, deletions and corrections carried out before general, Assembly and bye elections, with a qualifying date typically of 1 January.
When it is triggered: SIR is exceptional and is triggered only when rolls have remained largely unchanged for years or when large scale irregularities are suspected.
Statutory basis: Electoral rolls are prepared and maintained by the Election Commission of India under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, with intensive revision mandated under Sections 22 and 23 of that Act.
What is the current status of electoral roll revision in India?
Frequency in history: Intensive revisions have been carried out only 13 times in India’s history, in 1952, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1966, 1983-84, 1987-89, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2002, 2003 and 2004.
The current exercise: The Election Commission launched a nationwide SIR 2.0 from 4 November 2025, the first in 21 years, covering 9 States and 3 Union Territories and targeting approximately 51 crore voter records.
Method used: The exercise uses artificial intelligence driven duplicate detection and facial and identity match algorithms alongside field verification.
The officer chain: The Chief Electoral Officer at State level, the District Election Officer at district level, the Electoral Registration Officer at constituency level and Booth Level Officers at polling booth level carry out the work.
The immediately preceding exercise: The January 2025 Special Summary Revision was completed with no issues raised before the Bihar SIR was announced.
The presumption cutoff: The exercise uses 2003 as the citizenship presumption cutoff, which effectively re verifies every voter added between 2003 and 2025.
Constitutional Provisions Related to Elections and Electoral Rolls
Article 324: Establishes the Election Commission of India and vests in it the superintendence, direction and control of elections to Parliament, State Legislatures and the offices of President and Vice President.
Article 325: Guarantees that no person shall be ineligible for inclusion in, or claim to be included in, a special electoral roll on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
Article 326: Provides that elections to the House of the People and State Legislative Assemblies shall be on the basis of adult suffrage, so every citizen not disqualified by a specific legal exception may vote.
Articles 327 and 328: Authorise Parliament and State Legislatures respectively to make laws on all election related matters, including electoral rolls and delimitation of constituencies.
Article 329: Bars courts from questioning laws relating to delimitation of constituencies, making Delimitation Commission orders final and non justiciable.
Part XV: Articles 324 to 329 together constitute the electoral provisions of the Constitution, and they are the source of the Election Commission’s status as a constitutional body.
Why has election integrity become contested in both democracies at the same time?
Partisan mistrust as the common driver: Partisan politics in both countries has fostered political mistrust, which leads election losers to repeatedly question electoral integrity.
Both sides want purification, in opposite directions: The liberal and progressive strands and the conservative and nativist strands in both countries want to purify and streamline electoral rolls and processes, in different and often contradictory ways.
The ruling side’s claim: Ruling dispensations in both countries hold that the election process is too permissive and allows foreigners to obtain voting rights.
The opposition’s claim: Their opponents point to systematic and premeditated efforts to target social groups in the name of election integrity.
The point of agreement is narrow: No one disagrees that the process should be fair and transparent, and the agreement ends there.
The shared opportunity: India and the United States could lead a shared democratic agenda on election rules, but only after restoring trust and integrity in their own electoral processes.
How do the American and Indian election administration systems differ?
United States, a decentralised and federalised process: The American electoral process is highly federalised and governed by fragmented rules and politics that resist the idea of a nationwide SIR type exercise.
United States, the constitutional allocation: The Constitution grants each State its own methods, subject to the qualification that Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.
United States, the pending federal law: The expanded Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act was passed in February and is pending in the Senate, and would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo identity for voting.
United States, the gap identified: The decentralised system leaves too many loopholes in the process of enrolment and voting, and could benefit from a more robust national framework of the kind the Election Commission of India provides.
India, a constitutional election authority: The Indian Constitution establishes the Election Commission as a constitutional body, unlike the American arrangement of State by State methods.
India, a nationalised administration under strain: India’s nationalised election administration system has largely worked well and now faces a crisis of legitimacy.
The common legal position: There is no ambiguity in existing law in either country that only citizens may register and vote, and the controversy is entirely about the process of ensuring this.
Why can a legitimate requirement of clean rolls still damage trust?
The requirement itself is elementary: Clean electoral rolls of citizens, and voting with photo identity, are elementary requirements of a fair process, and neither is objectionable in principle.
The manner of introduction is the objection: In India the SIR is introducing the citizenship proof requirement without transparency, adequate consultation or sufficient time.
Frequency argues for care, not speed: SIR is meant to be conducted only once in 20 years, which is precisely why it should be carried out carefully and inclusively.
The same rule can serve two purposes: A requirement designed to exclude non citizens can equally be used to exclude citizens who lack the documents, and the two outcomes are indistinguishable in the roll.
The standard both countries must meet: In both countries the state must not selectively weaponise these requirements against those not in power.
Major debates surrounding electoral roll revision in India
Bihar, the scale of deletion: A 47 lakh net reduction in the final roll, with 3.66 lakh removed in the last phase after draft publication, and allegations of large scale deletions in four border districts ahead of State elections.
Bihar, the process failure: Booth Level Officers collected forms without acknowledgement slips, and contradictory deadlines of 25 July and 31 August caused mass confusion.
West Bengal, the notice requirement: Large scale deletions were alleged, with Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which requires individual notice before deletion, alleged to have been violated, and petitions filed in the Calcutta High Court against a contesting Commission affidavit.
Uttar Pradesh, the quality of verification: Concerns were raised over disproportionate deletions in minority heavy constituencies, with field verification by Booth Level Officers reported as cursory and forms collected in bulk.
Migrant voters: Multiple States including Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Assam reported that migrant workers away from their registered constituencies were deleted without notice.
Timing without a stated trigger: The SIR was announced within six months of a clean January 2025 summary revision with no new justification offered.
Feasibility of the timeline: The Commission’s own Assam National Register of Citizens experience shows that verification of this kind cannot be completed within the 90 days allotted.
Challenges to a credible electoral roll revision
Burden of proof falls on the voter: An intensive revision requires the voter to establish eligibility rather than requiring the state to establish ineligibility. e.g. the 2003 presumption cutoff placing the documentary burden on everyone enrolled between 2003 and 2025.
Migrant and mobile populations are structurally exposed: Voters absent from their registered address during door to door verification are recorded as untraceable and deleted. e.g. migrant workers in Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Assam reported as deleted without notice.
Notice requirements are unevenly observed: Deletion without individual notice removes the only opportunity to contest an error before publication. e.g. the alleged violation of Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 in West Bengal.
Field capacity does not match the timeline: Booth Level Officers carry the entire verification load within a compressed window, and shortcuts follow. e.g. forms collected in bulk without acknowledgement slips in Bihar and cursory verification reported in Uttar Pradesh.
Algorithmic deduplication carries error: Facial and identity match algorithms produce false positives that are removed before any human confirms the match. e.g. SIR 2.0 applying artificial intelligence driven duplicate detection across approximately 51 crore records.
Contradictory administrative communication: Multiple deadlines and changing instructions destroy the voter’s ability to comply. e.g. the 25 July and 31 August deadlines issued in Bihar.
Verification errors survive to the draft roll: Voters who submitted forms still appear in the deleted category, which shifts the burden to a post publication correction process. e.g. voters in Telangana finding their names listed under permanently shifted or dead in the recently released draft roll despite having filed forms.
Conclusion
Clean electoral rolls of citizens and voting with photo identity are elementary requirements of a fair process, and the disagreement in both India and the United States is about who the requirement is applied to and how. India’s nationalised system offers the national framework the American process lacks, and it is that system that now faces a crisis of legitimacy. An exercise conducted once in 20 years, over approximately 51 crore records, has to be carried out carefully and inclusively or it converts a legitimate purification into a selective exclusion. The obligation on the state in both countries is the same, not to weaponise these requirements against those not in power.
About: Election integrity is the condition in which every stage of an election, from enrolment to the declaration of results, is conducted according to law and is accepted as such by winners and losers alike.
Rationale: Democratic legitimacy rests on the losing side accepting the result, so integrity is measured by trust in the process rather than by the accuracy of the count alone.
Pre poll phase: Covers electoral roll preparation and revision, delimitation and representation, candidate scrutiny and disqualification, and the registration and recognition of political parties.
During poll phase: Covers the Model Code of Conduct, the voting mechanism including electronic voting machines and the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, and corrupt practices under Section 123 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
Post poll phase: Covers exit and opinion poll regulation under Sections 126A and 126(1)(b) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, and election disputes through election petitions before High Courts.
The statutory division: The Representation of the People Act, 1950 governs the preparatory side including rolls and delimitation, and the Representation of the People Act, 1951 governs the conduct of elections including candidates, offences and disputes.
Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Rolls and Elections
Representation of the People Act, 1950: Provides for allocation of seats in Parliament and State Legislatures, delimitation of constituencies, and the preparation and maintenance of electoral rolls, and defines the machinery of electoral officers.
Section 21: The provision under which electoral rolls are prepared and maintained.
Sections 22 and 23: The provisions mandating correction, deletion and inclusion of entries, under which intensive revision is conducted.
Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the conduct of elections, qualifications and disqualifications of candidates, nomination and scrutiny, corrupt practices, election offences, expenditure limits and election petitions.
Section 8: Provides for disqualification on conviction, with immediate disqualification of a sitting legislator convicted and sentenced to two years or more, continuing for six years after release.
Section 29A: Provides for registration of political parties with the Election Commission.
Section 29C: Requires parties to disclose all donations above twenty thousand rupees annually to the Commission.
Section 100: Sets out the grounds on which an election may be declared void.
Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Prescribe the procedure for preparation and revision of rolls, with Rule 18 requiring individual notice before deletion of an entry.
Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968: Governs recognition of parties as State or National parties and the allotment of reserved and free symbols.
Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Service Conditions) Act, 2023: Governs the appointment and service conditions of the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners.
Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961 (supplemented, not drawn from the Backgrounder): Prescribe the detailed procedure for nomination, polling, counting and declaration of results under the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
Election Commission Initiatives to Strengthen the Electoral Process
Electronic Voting Machines: Deployed across India since 2004, replacing the ballot box system used from 1952.
Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail: Deployed at all polling stations from the 2019 elections, printing a slip visible to the voter for seven seconds before it falls into a sealed compartment.
National Voters Services Portal: Allows voters to register, modify and confirm their electoral details online.
cVIGIL mobile application: Introduced for the 2019 elections, enabling over 20,000 complaints of electoral malpractice to be reported directly to the Commission, with complaints attended within 100 minutes in Bihar.
Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation: Targeted voter education campaigns that contributed to a turnout of approximately 67 percent in 2019, among the highest in Indian electoral history.
Photo electoral rolls: All voter lists carried photographs by the 2019 elections, reducing impersonation risk.
Election Seizure Management System: Provides real time reporting of interceptions of cash, liquor and other inducements, alongside 824 flying squads deployed in Bihar and static surveillance teams.
Biometric identification: Piloted in select constituencies during State elections to verify voter identity more accurately.
Key Facts about Elections and Electoral Rolls in India
Voter access commitments: No polling station is to have more than 1,200 voters, and polling stations are to be located within 2 km of voters’ residences.
Urban apathy measures: Polling stations are set up inside high rise buildings and residential colonies, with basic amenities guaranteed at every polling station.
Seat freeze: The Lok Sabha seat count has been frozen at 543 on the basis of 1971 Census figures, and average voters per constituency has grown from roughly 10 lakh in 1971 to 18 lakh today.
Delimitation Commissions: Four have been constituted so far, in 1952, 1963, 1973 and 2002.
Expenditure ceiling: The official Lok Sabha election expenditure limit is now 95 lakh rupees, up from 25,000 rupees in 1951-52.
Verification record of the machines: Over 4 crore Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail slips have been tallied with the electronic counts of their control units without a single mismatch recorded.
Criminalisation of politics: A record 251 of the 543 members elected to the 18th Lok Sabha in 2024, or 46 percent, have criminal cases registered against them, and the proportion with serious charges rose from 24 percent in 2004. e.g. the conviction rate for politicians involved in crimes standing at only 6 percent, so most accused legislators complete full terms.
Money power and unaccounted funding: Over 60 percent of party income often comes from unknown sources, and registered political parties now exceed 2,800. e.g. cash, liquor and drugs worth over 100 crore rupees seized in Bihar in 2025 and 733.43 crore rupees in Karnataka in 2023.
Seizures that do not convert into convictions: The burden of proving that seized cash was meant to influence votes defeats most cases. e.g. 303.86 crore rupees seized in the 2014 Lok Sabha election released after income assessment, with criminal cases filed in only three of hundreds of instances.
Frozen representation: Seats fixed on 1971 population data leave voters in high growth States under represented, and any correction risks penalising States that reduced fertility. e.g. five southern States together standing to lose approximately 24 seats under a straight redistribution of the existing 543.
Women’s under representation: Women form 49 percent of the population and held approximately 11 percent of Lok Sabha seats as of 2021. e.g. the Women’s Reservation Bill, first introduced in 1996, having failed multiple times, and state laws eroding the grassroots gains secured by the 73rd and 74th Amendments through retrograde eligibility criteria.
Model Code of Conduct without statutory backing: The Code lacks statutory force and is enforced indirectly through existing law. e.g. the Supreme Court in Union of India versus Harbans Singh Jalal (2001) holding that the Code comes into force on the day the election date is announced, and opining that legalising the Code may not be suitable.
Trust deficit in the Commission: Repeated controversies over electronic voting machines, SIR and turnout data have eroded the Commission’s moral authority. e.g. the demand that the Commission release detailed verification data and establish mechanisms for public scrutiny.
Exit and opinion poll regulation gaps: Parliament limited only exit poll publication until the final phase, leaving opinion polls comparatively unrestricted. e.g. exit polls after the 2024 general elections significantly missing the actual result.
Constitutional status: A constitutional body established on 25 January 1950 under Article 324, governed by Articles 324 to 329 in Part XV of the Constitution.
Jurisdiction: Conducts and supervises elections to Parliament, State Legislatures and the offices of President and Vice President.
Composition: A multi member body comprising one Chief Election Commissioner and up to two Election Commissioners.
Status of the Chief Election Commissioner: Holds the same status, salary and perquisites as a judge of the Supreme Court, and can be removed only by a parliamentary address in the manner of a Supreme Court judge.
Removal of Election Commissioners: An Election Commissioner can be removed by the President only on the recommendation of the Chief Election Commissioner.
Appointment: Governed by the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Service Conditions) Act, 2023, under which a Selection Committee comprising the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha recommends candidates.
The appointment dispute: The Supreme Court in Anoop Baranwal versus Union of India (2023) had directed that the selection panel include the Chief Justice of India until Parliament enacted a law, and the 2023 Act omitted the Chief Justice, which is under challenge.
Administrative functions: Preparation and revision of electoral rolls, notification of election dates, scrutiny of nomination papers, recognition of political parties and allotment of symbols.
Advisory and quasi judicial functions: Advises the President on disqualification of members of Parliament and Governors on State legislature disqualifications, cancels and reschedules polls for rigging or violence, and acts as a court for disputes on party recognition and symbols.
Way Forward
Publish the verification trail: Release booth level data on forms received, entries deleted and the reason recorded for each deletion, so that a claimed clean up is auditable rather than asserted.
Enforce the individual notice requirement: Make compliance with Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 a precondition for deletion, with a recorded acknowledgement for every form collected.
Match the timeline to the task: Set the revision period from the verification workload of the largest States rather than a uniform 90 day window, given the Assam experience.
Provide a portable enrolment route for migrants: Enable remote or transferable enrolment so that absence from the registered address during verification does not by itself trigger deletion.
Require human confirmation of algorithmic matches: Treat artificial intelligence generated duplicate and identity matches as flags for field verification rather than as grounds for deletion.
Publish a single calendar: Issue one set of deadlines for each State at the outset, so that contradictory dates of the kind issued in Bihar do not recur.
Restore the appointment safeguard: Settle the composition of the Selection Committee for Election Commissioners, since the Commission’s perceived independence is the foundation of any acceptance of its roll revision.
Build a bilateral democratic agenda on rules, not on claims: Convert the shared interest of India and the United States in citizen only rolls and verified voting into a technical exchange on enrolment standards, after each restores trust in its own process.
“[2018, GS2, 10 marks] In the light of recent controversy regarding the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), what are the challenges before the Election Commission of India to ensure the trustworthiness of elections in India?”
The enumeration phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls closed with forms uploaded for only 97.47 lakh of Delhi’s 1.45 crore electors, implying a deletion of about 32.41 per cent, the highest in the country. The same exercise has left 2.08 crore forms uncollected in Maharashtra and 1.08 crore Karnataka electors outside the draft roll. The revision is designed to purify the roll, and the figures show that the burden of staying on it has shifted to the elector within a fixed calendar.
What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?
About: A house to house revision of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in which every existing elector must be re verified rather than only new applicants being added.
Enumeration phase:Booth Level Officers (BLOs) carry pre filled enumeration forms door to door, help electors complete them and upload the details to the official portal.
Mapping requirement: Electors are required to map themselves or their lineage to an earlier reference roll, the 2002 roll in the States covered so far.
Consequence of non collection: A name whose form is not collected and digitised does not appear in the draft roll published at the end of the phase.
Restoration route: Exclusion from the draft is not final, since an elector may apply afresh during the claims and objections window.
What is the ASDDO category?
About: ASDDO stands for Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Other, the classification used for electors whose enumeration forms could not be collected.
What it does not mean: A form recorded as uncollected does not by itself establish that the elector is dead, has shifted or is ineligible, since the elector may simply not have been traced at the recorded address.
What is Form 6 in the electoral roll process?
About: Form 6 is the application for inclusion of a name in the electoral roll, prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
Use in this revision: Electors dropped from the draft roll must file Form 6 during the claims and objections period to be added to the final roll.
What do the State level enumeration figures show?
Delhi: Forms were uploaded for 97.47 lakh electors, about 67 per cent of the 1.45 crore on the roll when the exercise began, leaving 47.62 lakh marked uncollectible.
Maharashtra: Of an electorate of 9,78,54,049, forms for 7,69,52,262 or 78.64 per cent were digitised, 2,07,93,916 or 21.25 per cent were uncollected and 1,07,871 or 0.11 per cent remained pending.
Karnataka:1.08 crore electors fall in the ASDDO list, of whom 65.61 lakh or 11.84 per cent have permanently shifted, 16.38 lakh or 2.96 per cent are dead and 15.28 lakh or 2.76 per cent are untraceable or absent.
Karnataka notices: A further 25.14 lakh electors face notices under the No Mapping category for failing to link themselves or their lineage to the 2002 roll, with about 4.46 crore mapped electors digitised at 80.46 per cent.
Telangana:73.39 lakh names were deleted in the draft roll, 60 lakh showed anomalies and 32 lakh remain unmapped, so 92 lakh electors will receive notices out of a total of 3.38 crore.
Telangana breakdown:9,22,229 electors or 2.73 per cent have died, 57,46,803 or 16.99 per cent were found shifted or absent and 6,70,203 or 1.98 per cent were enrolled in more than one place.
Published draft rolls so far: Telangana recorded the highest deletion at 21.59 per cent, followed by Arunachal Pradesh at 19.09 per cent and Uttar Pradesh at 18.7 per cent.
How do the numbers differ between urban and rural districts?
City comparison: Deletions in the draft roll stand at 32.41 per cent in Delhi, 40.09 per cent in Hyderabad, 27.16 per cent in Pune and 20.26 per cent in Gurgaon.
Maharashtra’s four largest urban districts: Thane, Mumbai City, Mumbai Suburban and Pune account for 94.47 lakh uncollected forms, 45.4 per cent of the State total, while holding only 27.5 per cent of the electorate.
District level peaks: Thane leads with 28.88 lakh of 74.51 lakh electors uncollected at 38.77 per cent, followed by Mumbai City at 37.57 per cent, Mumbai Suburban at 34.48 per cent and Pune at 31.92 per cent.
Next tier: Nagpur recorded 14.06 lakh uncollected forms at 30.32 per cent, Palghar 6.87 lakh at 28.88 per cent and Raigad 5.91 lakh at 23.33 per cent.
Rural contrast: Uncollected forms stand at 8.82 per cent in Hingoli, 9.10 per cent in Buldhana, 9.93 per cent in Ratnagiri and 10.62 per cent in Latur.
Concentration: Seven districts hold about 1.21 crore or 58.3 per cent of all uncollected forms while holding about 37 per cent of Maharashtra’s electorate.
Movement in the final days: Maharashtra’s uncollected figure rose from 1.80 crore on 12 August to 2.08 crore on 17 August, an increase of about 27.3 lakh in five days.
Why are deletion rates highest in the largest cities?
Floating population: Officials attribute the urban pattern to large migrant workforces recorded at addresses they no longer occupy.
Address updation gap: Government employees and salaried private sector workers move frequently and rarely update their address in the roll.
Physical verification limits: A Booth Level Officer must find the elector at the recorded address, which fails in high rise and high churn neighbourhoods.
Refusal category: Delhi officials estimate 1 to 2 lakh electors in the Other category, covering those who refuse to sign or submit enumeration forms.
Booth level concentration: In nearly 3,000 booths in Karnataka, deletion rates exceed 60 per cent, so the effect is concentrated rather than spread evenly.
Timeline pressure: Delhi’s enumeration was extended twice, from 29 July to 8 August and then to 17 August, because digitisation of forms lagged.
Does a shorter roll necessarily mean a more accurate one?
Two defensible objectives: Removing dead, shifted and duplicate entries protects the roll, and retaining every genuine elector protects the franchise, and the same procedure serves both unevenly.
Category conflation: A single uncollected label covers the dead, the shifted, the duplicated and the merely absent, so an administrative failure to trace is recorded alongside genuine ineligibility.
Reversal of the burden: The elector must now prove entitlement afresh within a fixed window rather than the State proving ineligibility before deletion.
Unequal cost of restoration: Filing Form 6 and producing documents is easiest for those with stable addresses and hardest for the migrant workers who dominate the deletion lists.
Contested reading of the data: Officials state that the draft is not a permanent deletion, while civil society groups in Karnataka petitioned the Chief Minister that about half of Bengaluru’s electors face removal.
Demand for more time: Civil society groups have asked the Karnataka government to seek a three month extension of the revision and to approach the Supreme Court if necessary.
What is the timeline from draft roll to final roll?
Draft publication: Draft electoral rolls are published on 24 August in Delhi, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Claims and objections: Electors may file claims and objections in Delhi until 23 September, and in Telangana from 17 August to 16 September.
Disposal window: Claims and objections in Delhi are to be disposed of between 24 August and 22 October, and in Telangana until 15 October.
Notices for incomplete forms: Electors who submitted forms with incomplete details receive notices seeking proof of eligibility over the following two months.
Final roll: The final electoral roll for Delhi is published on 27 October, and only that number settles the actual scale of exclusion.
Pre draft correction: Booth Level Agents of political parties and residents may point out errors in the list before the draft is published.
Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision
Documentary burden on the poor: Proof of lineage against a 2002 roll is hardest for those without stable records. e.g. Karnataka has issued No Mapping notices to 25.14 lakh electors who could not link themselves to the 2002 list.
Compressed calendar: Enumeration, notice and disposal phases overlap, leaving little time for genuine electors to respond. e.g. Delhi’s enumeration was extended twice and still closed with 47.62 lakh forms uncollected.
Booth Level Officer workload: One official covers a full booth in a fixed window with no realistic revisit capacity. e.g. Thane recorded nearly four in ten forms uncollected against fewer than one in ten in Hingoli.
Migrant disenfranchisement: India has no portable voting right, so a worker deleted at the home address is not automatically enrolled at the workplace. e.g. Mumbai Suburban recorded 26.99 lakh uncollected forms in a district built on internal migration.
Political contestation of the process: Deletion figures become an electoral dispute rather than an administrative one. e.g. a leading public figure in Karnataka reported being marked as shifted during enumeration.
Verification quality: Duplicate and dead entries are identified by field report rather than by linkage to a civil registration database. e.g. Telangana classified 9.22 lakh electors as dead on field verification alone.
Appeal capacity: Disposal of lakhs of claims within two months strains Electoral Registration Officers. e.g. Telangana must dispose of notices to 92 lakh electors by 15 October.
Conclusion
The revision has converted a routine roll correction into a mass re registration event whose cost falls hardest on internal migrants in large cities. The published deletion figures record failure to trace as much as genuine ineligibility, and the two are not separated in the draft. Draft rolls publish on 24 August, claims and objections close on 23 September in Delhi, and the final roll on 27 October is the first number that will show how many genuine electors were actually lost. The scale of restoration achieved in that window is the real test of the exercise.
[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”
The Chief Election Commissioner stated on 16 August 2026 that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, which removed around 70 lakh names, was followed by a record 67.25 percent turnout in the 2025 Assembly election. The claim links roll purification to electoral participation at the same time that the revision is being contested elsewhere for excluding genuine electors.
What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?
About: The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) rebuilds the electoral roll from scratch, verifying every existing entry afresh. It differs from the annual summary revision, which only adds, deletes and corrects entries at the margin.
Legal basis: The Election Commission of India (ECI) draws the power from Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which permits a special revision of the roll for any constituency at any time.
Enumeration stage:Booth Level Officers deliver and collect enumeration forms house to house. An existing elector who does not return the form does not carry into the draft roll.
Documentary stage: Electors not traceable to an earlier qualifying roll must furnish proof of date and place of birth. The 2003 Bihar roll served as the cut off reference in that State.
Claims and objections: A draft roll is published and a claims and objections window follows before the final roll. Appeals lie to the District Magistrate and then to the Chief Electoral Officer under Sections 24(a) and 24(b) of the 1950 Act.
Who is a Booth Level Officer?
About: A Booth Level Officer (BLO) is a local government or semi government employee appointed as the Election Commission’s field representative for a single polling station area.
Function: The BLO verifies entries house to house and assists the Electoral Registration Officer in preparing and updating the roll.
What is the Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation programme?
About:Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) is the Election Commission’s voter education and outreach programme, running since 2009.
Function: It targets low turnout segments and first time voters through registration drives, campus outreach and mass media campaigns.
What is ECINET?
About:ECINET is the Election Commission’s single unified digital platform, built to merge over 40 separate voter and election applications into one interface.
Function: It brings voter registration, roll search, grievance filing and candidate affidavit access into a common login for electors, candidates and election officials.
What does the Election Commission’s Bihar assessment rest on?
Scale of deletion: The revision ran over a three month period and removed around 70 lakh names from the Bihar rolls.
Turnout figure: The November 2025 Assembly election recorded a 67.25 percent turnout, described by the Commission as the highest for Bihar since Independence.
International comparison: The turnout was placed above that recorded in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Japan.
Precedent value: The exercise was described as the most successful nationwide initiative for purification of electoral rolls, with Bihar as its point of origin.
Nature of the claim: The case rests on a sequence, a cleaner roll followed by a higher turnout, without a separate study isolating the revision’s own contribution.
Why does a cleaner roll raise the recorded turnout?
Denominator effect: Turnout is votes polled divided by registered electors. Removing dead, shifted and duplicate entries shrinks the denominator and lifts the percentage even when no additional elector votes.
Scale of that effect: A deletion of about 70 lakh names from a roll of roughly 7.9 crore electors cuts the base by close to 9 percent.
Mobilisation effect: House to house enumeration places a field officer at every household, which itself works as a registration and awareness contact.
Migration correction: Bihar has heavy outward migration, and migrants enrolled in the State depress turnout without ever voting there. Their removal raises the measured figure.
Limits of the inference: Turnout also moves with the closeness of the contest, weather and pre poll welfare announcements. Roll purification and higher participation are not the same achievement.
What does the Electoral Literacy Club 2.0 redesign involve?
Origin:Electoral Literacy Clubs (ELCs) were launched in 2018 under SVEEP to familiarise students and young citizens with democratic values, the electoral process and the working of the Election Commission.
Reason for the redesign: The revision responds to the changed information and communication environment and the higher digital engagement of young people.
New design: Clubs in schools, colleges and universities are to run as active, experiential and digitally enabled platforms operating through the year, rather than as one off event bodies.
Rollout: The launch conference at Patna draws students, teachers, vice chancellors, principals and institutional heads from more than 400 educational institutions across Bihar.
Companion launch:ECINET is being launched alongside, moving roll services and grievance redress onto a single platform.
Why is the Election Commission consulting Booth Level Officers directly?
Scale of the interaction: Around 500 Booth Level Officers are to be met at Rajgir to report ground level difficulties and suggest measures.
Workload: A single BLO verifies roughly 1,200 electors in one polling area during a revision, alongside a regular government posting.
Accountability exposure: The BLO signs off on additions and deletions, so roll errors surface first as complaints against the BLO.
Design feedback: Form design, document lists and timelines are fixed centrally, and their workability is visible only at the booth.
Trust interface: The BLO is the only Commission functionary most electors ever meet, so the credibility of the revision rests on that contact.
Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision
Burden of proof shifts to the elector: The elector must establish eligibility rather than the State establishing ineligibility. e.g. in Bihar, electors absent from the 2003 roll had to produce one of eleven listed documents, a list that excluded Aadhaar when the exercise began.
Exclusion of migrants: Seasonal and long distance migrants are absent when the enumeration form is delivered and are recorded as untraceable. e.g. Bihar supplies a large migrant workforce to Delhi, Punjab and Maharashtra, and absentee households formed one of the largest deletion categories.
Documentary gaps at the bottom of the income distribution: Birth and residence records are least available to landless households, women married into another district and people without formal schooling. e.g. the Supreme Court in the 2025 Bihar hearings directed the Commission to treat Aadhaar as an additional identity document.
Appeal capacity after deletion: A deletion is reversed only through an individual appeal that most excluded electors never file. e.g. the West Bengal revision left about 36.6 lakh cases pending before 19 tribunals.
Spillover into welfare access: Removal from the roll affects benefit access wherever the roll doubles as residence proof. e.g. electors excluded in the West Bengal revision face denial of State welfare entitlements.
The base year roll carries its own errors forward: A revision anchored to an older roll treats that roll as presumptively correct. e.g. the Bihar exercise took the 2003 intensive revision roll as the benchmark, so any error already inside it survived unexamined.
Conclusion
The Commission’s position is that the Bihar revision cleaned the roll and that a record turnout followed. Part of the measured gain comes from a smaller denominator, so a purified roll and a more participative electorate are separate claims. The next milestones are the rollout of Electoral Literacy Club 2.0 and ECINET, and the disposal of exclusion claims in the States where the revision is still running.
Electoral Roll Management in India
About: The electoral roll is the constituency wise list of persons qualified to vote, prepared by the Electoral Registration Officer and revised before every general election.
Scale: India’s roll carries close to 99 crore electors across about 10.5 lakh polling stations, the largest managed electorate in the world.
Qualifying dates: Since the Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021, a person may register with reference to four qualifying dates in a year, 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, replacing the single 1 January cut off.
Machinery: The Commission has no permanent field cadre and works through State government staff deputed as Electoral Registration Officers and Booth Level Officers.
Two revision types: A summary revision updates the roll annually, while an intensive or special intensive revision reconstructs it.
Constitutional Framework Governing Elections and Electoral Rolls
Article 324: Vests superintendence, direction and control of elections to Parliament, State legislatures, the office of President and the office of Vice President in the Election Commission.
Article 325: Bars a separate electoral roll for any constituency on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex, and bars exclusion from the general roll on those grounds.
Article 326: Provides that elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies shall be on the basis of adult suffrage, with 18 years as the qualifying age.
Article 327: Empowers Parliament to make provision with respect to elections, including the preparation of electoral rolls.
Article 328: Gives State legislatures a residual power to legislate on elections to their own legislature.
Article 329: Bars courts from questioning the validity of a delimitation law and confines election disputes to an election petition.
Article 324(5): Protects the Chief Election Commissioner from removal except in the manner and on the grounds applicable to a Supreme Court judge.
Articles 243K and 243ZA: Vest panchayat and municipal roll preparation and election conduct in State Election Commissions, separate from the Election Commission of India.
Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Rolls
Representation of the People Act, 1950: Provides for the allocation of seats, delimitation of constituencies and the preparation of electoral rolls.
Section 16: Disqualifications for registration, including non citizenship and unsoundness of mind.
Section 19: Conditions of registration, being 18 years of age and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
Section 21: Power to prepare, revise and specially revise the roll.
Sections 22 and 23: Correction, deletion and inclusion of entries.
Section 24: Appeals against orders of the Electoral Registration Officer.
Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the actual conduct of elections, qualifications and disqualifications of candidates, corrupt practices and election petitions.
Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Prescribes the forms, including Form 6 for new registration, Form 6A for overseas electors, Form 7 for objection to inclusion and Form 8 for corrections and shifting.
Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961: Governs polling, counting and the declaration of results.
Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021: Allows voluntary linking of Aadhaar with the electoral roll, introduces four qualifying dates and makes service voter provisions gender neutral.
Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023: Governs the appointment, salary and tenure of the Commission’s members.
Back2Basics: Election Commission of India
A constitutional body established under Article 324, which came into existence on 25 January 1950.
Originally a single member body, it became a multi member body permanently from 1 October 1993, with a Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners.
Members hold office for six years or until the age of 65, whichever is earlier.
The Chief Election Commissioner can be removed only by the process applicable to a Supreme Court judge, while an Election Commissioner is removed on the Chief Election Commissioner’s recommendation.
It conducts elections to Parliament, State legislatures, and the offices of President and Vice President, and does not conduct local body elections.
It registers political parties and allots symbols under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968.
Headquarters: Nirvachan Sadan, New Delhi.
Government Initiatives
SVEEP: The flagship voter education programme, targeting low turnout pockets, women, young and urban electors.
Electoral Literacy Clubs and ELC 2.0: Institution based clubs converting classroom electoral literacy into year round, digitally enabled activity.
ECINET: A unified platform consolidating over 40 Commission applications and portals into one login.
cVIGIL: A citizen application for reporting Model Code of Conduct violations with a 100 minute response commitment.
Voter Helpline App and National Voters’ Service Portal: Online registration, roll search and grievance tracking for electors.
ERONET: The backend platform used by Electoral Registration Officers to process roll applications.
Home voting facility: Postal ballot at residence for electors above 85 years, persons with benchmark disabilities and essential service workers.
Saksham App: Accessibility services for persons with disabilities, including wheelchair requests at polling stations.
Key Facts about the Election Commission and Electoral Rolls
National Voters’ Day is observed on 25 January, marking the Commission’s foundation day, and has been observed since 2011.
The 61st Constitutional Amendment Act, 1988 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
NOTA was introduced after PUCL v. Union of India, 2013.
The first general election was held in 1951 to 1952.
The Model Code of Conduct originated in Kerala in 1960 and remains non statutory, enforced through the Commission’s Article 324 powers.
Section 62(5) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 bars persons in prison from voting.
VVPAT was first used in the Noksen Assembly constituency of Nagaland in 2013.
Challenges in Electoral Roll Management
Duplicate entries across States: A person registered in two States remains countable twice until one entry is deleted. e.g. duplicate Elector Photo Identity Card numbers across State rolls were flagged by the Commission in 2025, prompting a unique numbering exercise.
Internal migrants remain effectively disenfranchised: An elector registered in the home State cannot vote from the workplace. e.g. the Commission’s proposed Remote Electronic Voting Machine demonstration in January 2023 was deferred after political parties objected.
Urban apathy in registration and voting: Metropolitan constituencies persistently record turnout below rural averages. e.g. Mumbai and Bengaluru seats have repeatedly polled in the fifties while adjoining rural seats crossed seventy percent.
Dependence on borrowed staff: The Commission has no permanent field cadre and relies on State employees. e.g. schoolteachers deputed as Booth Level Officers handle enumeration alongside teaching duties.
Aadhaar linkage and privacy: Linking is legally voluntary but is pursued as a mass collection drive. e.g. the Supreme Court has been asked to examine whether the voluntary character of Aadhaar seeding was preserved during roll updation drives.
Registration gaps for marginal groups: Homeless persons, transgender electors and pavement dwellers lack the address proof the forms assume. e.g. the Commission has had to permit registration of homeless electors on the basis of a Booth Level Officer’s night visit verification.
Weak deterrence against wrongful deletion: Objections under Form 7 can be filed in bulk with limited verification. e.g. mass Form 7 objections in urban constituencies have repeatedly triggered Commission inquiries into organised deletion attempts.
Way Forward
Publish a machine readable deletion audit: Release booth wise reasons for every deletion, categorised as deceased, shifted, duplicate or untraceable, so the reduction in the roll is independently verifiable.
Create a statutory appeal timeline: Fix an outer limit for disposal of Section 24 appeals and provide free legal assistance to excluded electors at the tribunal stage.
Build a permanent electoral registration cadre: Replace fully deputed staff with a trained standing cadre at the district level to reduce error and turnover.
Operationalise remote voting for migrants: Move the remote voting machine pilot forward with an all party technical audit, so migration ceases to be a deletion ground.
Adopt a single national elector identity: Complete the unique elector number rollout so cross State duplicates are eliminated without deleting genuine electors.
De link the roll from welfare eligibility: Ensure that ration, pension and housing entitlements are not conditioned on electoral roll presence.
Institutionalise the Booth Level Officer consultation: Convert one off conferences into a standing feedback mechanism feeding into form design and document lists.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2018, GS2, 10 marks] In the light of recent controversy regarding the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), what are the challenges before the Election Commission of India to ensure the trustworthiness of elections in India?”
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