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Subject: RPAxElectoral Reforms

  • Unprecedented rupture inside Election Commission: ECs call steps on new voters ‘unauthorised, illegal’

    Why in the News

    Two of the three Election Commissioners have objected on record at least 14 times over the last 10 months to decisions taken and orders issued in the name of the Election Commission of India (ECI) without their knowledge. Four of those objections were recorded on a single day, and five of the 14 notes were copied to the Chief Election Commissioner. They call the changes made to the form a new voter fills “unauthorised” and “illegal”. They also warn that the electoral roll database is being centralised in Delhi, restricting the statutory officers on the ground. The objections run alongside the national rollout of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which has struck more than 13 crore names off the draft rolls in 30 States and Union Territories. The law requires this three-member constitutional body to transact its business unanimously as far as possible, and the two members who form its majority say they were kept in the dark.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls?

    1. About: The SIR is a special revision of the electoral roll that the Commission may order under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
    2. A one-time exception: The provision was invoked as a one time measure and exception, not as the ordinary revision route.
    3. Non-statutory forms: The forms prescribed for the SIR are specific to that exercise and are non-statutory, meaning they are not part of the law.
    4. Rollout: The revision began in Bihar in June 2025. It was then extended state by state, and was under way in 12 States and Union Territories by January 2026.

    How is the Election Commission legally required to transact its business?

    1. Constitutional composition: The Commission is a constitutional body under Article 324. It is made up of the Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners who are equal in rank.
    2. No power to decide alone: The Chief Election Commissioner is first among equals. He does not have the power to decide by himself.
    3. Unanimity as the default: Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023 requires all business of the Commission to be transacted unanimously as far as possible. Where the members differ on any matter, that matter is decided by the opinion of the majority.
    4. Procedure only by unanimity: The same section lets the Commission settle its own procedure and the division of its work only by unanimous decision.
    5. Communications without approval: In April one Commissioner told senior officers that many communications go out in the ECI’s name without the Commission’s approval. Eight days later the other recorded that several communications are disseminated without the requisite approval of the Commission.
    6. Appointment route: All three members were appointed under the 2023 Act by a selection panel of the Prime Minister, the Union Home Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The Opposition member on the panel recorded a dissent over the appointment process on both occasions.

    Why do two Commissioners call the change to the new voter form unauthorised and illegal?

    1. The change: From July the form every adult citizen fills to become a voter began asking whether the applicant, or a parent or grandparent, exists in the electoral roll of the last SIR. Applicants could not proceed without answering.
    2. Three options and no fourth: The applicant had to pick between their own name in the roll of the last SIR held in the early 2000s, a parent’s or grandparent’s name in that roll, or neither. The section was not marked mandatory, yet the form could not be submitted without an answer.
    3. A statutory form has a statutory route: Form 6 for new registration and Form 8 for corrections are prescribed statutorily. Neither can be altered without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
    4. The warning on file: One Commissioner recorded in May that a sentence in an SIR order or guideline cannot change a form fixed by law. His colleague concurred on file three days later.
    5. The advised course: The recorded advice was to send the proposal to the Government for changes to the rules. A draft of the changes to both forms was to be placed before the Commission.
    6. The precedent for the correct route: Parliament amended the Representation of the People Act, 1950 in 2021 to let the Commission collect Aadhaar numbers from voters. The Law Ministry’s Legislative Department, not the Commission, notified the consequent changes to the Rules and to Form 6 in June 2022.
    7. The objection on record: In August one Commissioner recorded that the change was “unauthorised and illegal” and “must be removed immediately so that young and would-be first time voters, who are otherwise eligible, can register themselves as voters as per law, without any harassment”.
    8. The change survived the objection: The question was still on the portal more than a month after that note.
    9. Why it matters for an 18 year old: The right to vote belongs to the individual, who qualifies by age, citizenship and residence. An applicant whose parents and grandparents did not figure in the last SIR roll could not truthfully choose either of the first two options, and the form did not explain the consequence of choosing the third.

    What does centralisation of the voter database do to the statutory officer on the ground?

    1. The decentralised design: The Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 assign the electoral roll to an Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), one for each Assembly seat, usually the sub-divisional magistrate. The ERO prepares the list, hears claims and objections, and decides which names stay.
    2. The Commission’s standing defence: For decades the ECI has answered allegations of mass manipulation of rolls by pointing to that design. No single person is supposed to control the voters’ list.
    3. The platform: ECINet, launched in January, brought more than 40 of the Commission’s apps and portals under one roof as the technology backbone for almost a billion voters. It subsumed ERONet, the earlier roll management system.
    4. Warnings before the launch: In November 2025 a Deputy Election Commissioner wrote, on a Commissioner’s directions, that the statutory functions of the ERO, the District Election Officer and the Chief Electoral Officer were “to be strictly exercised by them and no one else”.
    5. Warning on the new module: In January 2026 the same officer asked that the system not restrict the ERO’s discretion to act, as EROs were put on a new module for issuing notices and holding hearings. ECINet was launched twenty days later.
    6. Access withdrawn in practice: In August one Commissioner recorded that state level officials said they did not have “proper and complete access” to ERONet and so could not perform their statutory duties. Their powers had been “curtailed by centralised control of ERONet at DG(IT) level”, he wrote.
    7. Question of legal authority: The Commission’s Director General (Information Technology) has no legal authority to restrict the access and freedom to operate that the law gives the statutory authorities, that note recorded.
    8. Audit proposed: In May one Commissioner flagged the “gradual centralisation of the electoral roll database”. He proposed an audit, with an outside expert from the Indian Institutes of Technology, to certify that only the concerned statutory authorities hold credentials to change the voter database.
    9. Two committees proposed: One committee was to review the systems periodically and certify who holds those credentials. A second was to check whether ECINet complies with the law and to bring policy changes before the Commission.
    10. Outcome of the proposal: The other Commissioner endorsed it in July. In August he recorded that any action taken on the two notes was not known to him.
    11. What is at stake: A voter can be eligible, prove it, be found eligible by the officer the law appoints, and still not appear on the roll. A team in Delhi that controls what the software permits can stall, override or cancel what ground level officials decide.

    How was the oversight layer over the IT division removed?

    1. The chain that existed: A Deputy Election Commissioner in New Delhi oversaw the IT division’s work and routed its files to the three-member Commission. The two Commissioners had used that chain to seek briefings and to propose the audit.
    2. The reallocation: In late July a Senior Deputy Election Commissioner was given additional charge of administration during the regular officer’s leave. Within hours he changed the work allocation without consulting the Commission, taking the Deputy Election Commissioner out of oversight of the IT division.
    3. Escalation outside the Commission: The two Commissioners each wrote separately to the Cabinet Secretary the next day. They called the order a clear violation of the law governing the Commission and sought appropriate action against the officer.
    4. The order set aside: A day later the two jointly set the order aside as “without any reason and justification”. They directed the previous work allocation to continue until the Commission reached a consensus.
    5. First full meeting in four months: The Chief Election Commissioner and the two Commissioners then met on 9 September. It was their first full meeting in four months.

    What did the West Bengal appeals and the Goa rejections expose?

    1. Scale of contestation in West Bengal: The SIR was most deeply contested in West Bengal. Of the 294 seats that went to polls, deletions exceeded the victory margin in 49, and those were shared almost evenly, with 26 won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and 21 by the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
    2. The Court’s intervention: The manner in which names were struck off prompted the Supreme Court in February 2026 to take the last leg of the SIR out of the Commission’s hands. Judicial officers were directed to decide the cases of 60 lakh voters flagged for “logical discrepancies”.
    3. Deletions and appeals: The Commission subsequently deleted 27 lakh of those electors. Tribunals of retired High Court judges were ordered to hear appeals, and 38 lakh appeals are now pending before them.
    4. Appeals against restored voters: Of those pending appeals, 22.21 lakh were filed by deleted voters seeking restoration. The other 16.10 lakh were filed against voters whom the judicial officers had included, and the Commission did not say who filed them.
    5. The objection recorded: One Commissioner asked in August who was authorised to file appeals on the ECI’s behalf, and who actually filed them. Neither Commissioner nor the state’s Chief Electoral Officer had been informed of the basis or the process, he recorded.
    6. Goa, a decision the software could not hold: A “logical discrepancy” is a mismatch the software throws up when it tries to link a voter to a parent or relative on an older roll, such as a name that does not match or an age gap that does not add up. Goa’s EROs heard such cases on the documents produced and found 97 voters eligible for the final roll.
    7. Eight unanswered letters: Goa’s Chief Electoral Officer’s office wrote eight times in February to the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner in charge of the state, copying the Director General (Information Technology) each time. It asked for the rollback option that would let EROs reverse the earlier deletions, as the Supreme Court had directed in January.
    8. The outcome: The provision was not enabled before the deadline for publishing the final roll. The 97 were left off the final voters’ roll in Goa.

    How does this rupture differ from earlier dissent inside the Commission?

    1. The 2009 episode: In January 2009 the Chief Election Commissioner wrote to the President recommending that Election Commissioner Navin Chawla be removed for alleged partisan conduct. The Government rejected the recommendation in March 2009, and Chawla succeeded him as Chief Election Commissioner that April.
    2. The 2019 episode: In May 2019 Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner that he would stop attending meetings on Model Code of Conduct complaints until his minority decisions were recorded in the final orders. He had disagreed with the majority’s clean chits to the Prime Minister and to the then president of the BJP.
    3. How that ended: The full Commission decided, 2-1, that dissents would be recorded in the file but not in the orders. Lavasa left the Commission the following year, before his turn as Chief Election Commissioner.
    4. Dissent on an outcome, not on process: In both episodes an individual member dissented on a specific decision on which he had been overruled.
    5. This time the majority is in the dark: The two Commissioners who form the majority are recording that decisions were taken, orders issued and cases filed without their knowledge. That is a statement about how the Commission functions, not a disagreement over a result.
    6. No response: The Commission and both Commissioners did not respond to questionnaires, emails and follow up calls.

    Conclusion

    A constitutional body’s strongest answer to charges of roll manipulation has been that no single office controls the list. That answer now turns on who holds the credentials to the software. The two members who form the majority have put on record that they cannot verify the claim themselves, and the Commission has not answered the questions they raised. The markers to watch are whether the disputed declaration is taken off the new voter form, whether the proposed audit of database credentials is placed before the full Commission, and whether the Commission discloses who filed appeals in its name against voters that a court’s officers had restored.

    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?”

  • The ECI must end its method of deleting first and verifying later

    Why in the News

    A counter affidavit filed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the Supreme Court shows that of more than 38 lakh appeals submitted to Special Intensive Revision (SIR) appellate tribunals in West Bengal, just over 1,22,000 were disposed of by early September 2026, a disposal rate of 3.2 percent. Of those decided, 1,13,943 electors were added back to the rolls, an inclusion rate of nearly 93 percent. The appeals arose from the claims and corrections phase, in which judicial officers deployed for verification deemed 27 lakh of the 60 lakh electors flagged for “logical discrepancies” to be ineligible. The conduct of the ECI is itself what is in question here, because the appellate outcome is evidence about the quality of its own deletion stage. The tension is that a body committed to the position that not one eligible elector should be left out is removing electors at a rate its own appellate machinery reverses nine times in ten, and reversing them far slower than it removed them.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision and how does it work?

    1. The exercise: It is a house to house revision of the electoral roll in which every existing elector is required to establish eligibility afresh rather than be carried forward from the previous roll.
    2. The enumeration stage: Enumeration forms are distributed to households, and an elector who does not return a completed form enters the next stage as unverified.
    3. The mapping requirement: Electors are required to link themselves to rolls drawn in the early 2000s, and a failure to match produces a recorded “discrepancy”.
    4. The adjudication stages: Flagged cases go to judicial officers deployed for verification in the claims and corrections phase, and a deletion at that stage can be contested before an appellate tribunal.

    What do the West Bengal appeal numbers show?

    1. The scale of contest: More than 22 lakh of those found ineligible have appealed, which is over four fifths of the 27 lakh deleted at the verification stage.
    2. The disposal rate: Just over 1,22,000 of more than 38 lakh appeals had been disposed of by early September 2026, a rate of 3.2 percent.
    3. The inclusion rate: ECI data show that more than nine in 10 cases decided by the tribunals have ended with the elector back on the rolls, an inclusion rate of nearly 93 percent.
    4. What the two rates imply together: If these rates hold, the majority of the 27 lakh electors should not have been found ineligible in the first place, and are now struggling to get back on the rolls.

    Why does the appellate record indict the deletion stage rather than vindicate the appeal?

    1. The error rate is the finding: A tribunal restoring 93 percent of the cases it decides is not a functioning safety valve, it is a measurement of how wrong the stage below it was.
    2. Remedy slower than harm: Deletion was completed across the State while barely one appeal in thirty has been decided, so the correction cannot catch the error inside an electoral cycle.
    3. The timing of the harm: The deletions preceded the West Bengal Assembly polls, which means the disenfranchisement took effect at the one moment the roll actually decides anything.
    4. The next deadline is already close: Municipal elections in the State are approaching, so the same unrestored electors face a second poll off the rolls unless the appellate process is accelerated.

    What does the Delhi draft roll show about the enumeration itself?

    1. The arithmetic anomaly: In Phase 3 of the SIR, in 24 of Delhi’s 70 constituencies, the draft roll now records fewer electors than the number who actually voted in the February 2025 Assembly election.
    2. Why the innocent explanations do not hold: Such large scale deletion cannot hold unless there was major migration out of the capital region or large numbers of voters were never ordinarily resident in Delhi, and neither is plausible at that scale.
    3. The more plausible reading: The enumeration itself has struck off actual voters, since the process puts the onus of proving eligibility on the elector and the dropping of enumeration forms at homes has not translated into full enumeration.
    4. Discrepancies manufactured by the method: Requiring electors to link themselves to rolls drawn in the early 2000s produces recorded discrepancies even where the documents submitted are valid.
    5. The current exposure: In Delhi this mapping has put 13.79 lakh electors under notice, with a further 19.33 lakh flagged for logical discrepancies on undefined grounds.

    What has the Supreme Court’s role been across the SIR phases?

    1. The Bihar intervention: While hearing the Bihar SIR petitions, the Court intervened sharply to stop eligible voters from being struck off.
    2. The year since: Its permissiveness in the year since has allowed disenfranchisement on a scale that will remain a mark on the jurisprudence of universal adult franchise in India.
    3. The present hearings: The Court is now hearing petitions on Delhi and West Bengal, and the remedy sought is that it compel the ECI to reverse course.
    4. The shared formulation: The Court has used the same refrain as the ECI, that not one eligible elector should be left out of the rolls, which makes the gap between the standard and the record the question before it.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision as it is being run

    1. The burden of proof sits on the elector: A revision that presumes ineligibility until documents are produced falls hardest on those least able to produce them. Eg. Delhi’s mapping to rolls of the early 2000s has put 13.79 lakh electors under notice.
      The Fix: Reverse the presumption, so an elector on the last final roll stays on it unless the Electoral Registration Officer records positive evidence of ineligibility.
    2. “Logical discrepancies” is an undefined category: Flagging on grounds the notice does not state leaves the elector unable to answer the objection. Eg. A further 19.33 lakh electors in Delhi were flagged on undefined grounds.
      The Fix: Publish the exhaustive list of discrepancy codes and require every notice to carry the specific code and the underlying record relied on.
    3. No deadline binds the appellate stage: Deletion runs to an electoral calendar while restoration runs to none, so the two stages operate at incompatible speeds. Eg. The West Bengal tribunals had disposed of 3.2 percent of appeals by early September 2026.
      The Fix: Fix a statutory outer limit for disposal of an SIR appeal and bar the publication of a final roll until pending appeals in that constituency are decided.
    4. Field capacity is stretched by the timetable: Booth Level Officers carry the enumeration load on top of their regular duties, so form coverage is incomplete before the deletion stage begins. Eg. Enumeration forms dropped at homes in Delhi did not translate into full enumeration.
      The Fix: Publish constituency wise enumeration coverage before the draft roll, and extend the enumeration window wherever coverage falls below a declared threshold.
    5. There is no published audit of deletions: No independent check runs between the verification decision and the publication of the draft roll. Eg. The scale of the error in West Bengal became visible only through the appellate inclusion rate, after the Assembly polls.
      The Fix: Require a random sample audit of deletions by an authority outside the district election machinery, with the sample error rate published alongside the draft roll.

    Conclusion

    The appellate inclusion rate is the clearest available measure of how the verification stage performed, and it points to a deletion process that was wrong far more often than it was right. Restoring an elector after the vote has been held is not a remedy, because the right that was lost was exercisable only on one day. The two things that cannot both hold are the ECI’s stated commitment that no eligible elector be left out and a revision method that removes first and verifies afterwards, and nothing in the current design reconciles them. What to watch is whether the Court, in the Delhi and West Bengal petitions, ties the publication of a final roll to the disposal of pending appeals.

    Back2Basics

    1. Representation of the People Act, 1950: It provides for the allocation of seats and the delimitation of constituencies, and it governs the qualification of voters and the preparation of electoral rolls.
    2. The ordinarily resident test: A person is entitled to registration in a constituency only if ordinarily resident in it, and registration in more than one constituency is barred.
    3. Who prepares the roll: The Electoral Registration Officer for each constituency prepares and revises the roll, under the superintendence and control of the Election Commission of India.
    4. The appeal route: An order of the Electoral Registration Officer on inclusion or deletion is appealable to the designated appellate authority, which is the machinery the SIR tribunals sit within.

    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?”

  • In India’s capital, Delhiites reduced to documents

    Why in the News

    Delhi’s electoral roll has fallen from 1.45 crore electors on 16 June 2026 to 97.5 lakh under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), with 47.6 lakh names marked Absent, Shifted, Dead or Duplicate (ASDD) at the draft stage. More than a third of those who remain on the draft roll have been served notices and must now establish their eligibility at hearing centres. The revision was rolled out in 2025 ahead of the Bihar Assembly election to identify duplicate entries and remove the dead, the shifted and illegal migrants, and it has since covered 30 States and Union Territories, with over 13 crore names removed at the draft stage nationally. The tension the Delhi hearings expose is that an exercise designed to clean the roll requires an existing elector to re prove an entitlement the state has already recognised repeatedly, and that documentary burden falls hardest on the people least able to produce records reaching back to 2002.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

    1. Purpose: The SIR is an exercise to clean voter lists by identifying duplicate entries and removing the names of the dead, those who have moved from their registered address, and illegal migrants.
    2. Origin: It was rolled out in 2025 immediately before the Bihar Assembly election and has since been extended to 30 of India’s States and Union Territories.
    3. The mapping test: Electors are matched against the earlier SIR rolls, and a person whose own name or a relative’s name is not found on those rolls is recorded as unmapped.
    4. Scale of removal: Over 13 crore names have been removed from voter lists nationally at the draft stage.

    What do the Delhi numbers show?

    1. Roll contraction: The roll fell from 1.45 crore on 16 June 2026 to 97.5 lakh.
    2. ASDD exclusions: Around 47.6 lakh people were marked Absent, Shifted, Dead or Duplicate as the recorded reason for exclusion at the draft stage.
    3. Unmapped notices: More than 13.79 lakh people were served notices after being marked unmapped.
    4. Logical discrepancies: Another 19.33 lakh were flagged for logical discrepancies, a category covering name mismatches and age related anomalies.
    5. The calendar: Notices are to be disposed of by 29 October after documents are submitted online or at a hearing centre, and the final roll is to be published on 4 November.

    Why have documents become the binding constraint?

    1. Eleven prescribed proofs: The Election Commission of India prescribes eleven identity documents for the SIR, and many of those who attend hearings hold none of them.
    2. Aadhaar is not sufficient on its own: The Election Commission’s Standard Operating Procedure for the SIR states that submitting only Aadhaar is not enough.
    3. Certificates rejected on a missing field: A Class 12 certificate was refused at a Chandni Chowk centre because it did not carry a date of birth, and the elector’s Class 10 certificate had been destroyed in a house fire.
    4. An unlisted document pressed into service: Electors at Rajouri Garden were asked for PAN cards. The Electoral Registration Officer’s stated position is that PAN is taken only as an additional date of birth proof where a listed document is absent or unsatisfactory, and that it is not mandatory.
    5. Discretion filling the gap: The Assistant Electoral Registration Officer at the Chandni Chowk centre said no attendee on one day held the required documents, that officials were accepting whatever was brought from a Class 5 marksheet to a hospital discharge card, and that at least 50 people were still turned away daily for holding no valid document at all.

    Where does the burden of the process actually fall?

    1. Wage loss per visit: A daily wage earner at the Chandni Chowk centre lost a day’s earning of Rs 400 to Rs 500 to attend, with no other income for a household of three.
    2. Repeat trips: The same attendee was sent home two kilometres for a bank passbook and then a further kilometre for photocopies, before waiting two hours without resolution.
    3. Cumulative cost: One household had lost two days of wages and still faced the cost of an internet cafe and the corrections yet to be filed.
    4. The online route is unknown or unusable: Most notice recipients did not know documents could be submitted online through the QR code printed on the notice, and an elector who attempted it was rejected by the system for lacking the right documents despite attaching what was listed.
    5. Anomalies that are clerical in nature: One elector’s only recorded discrepancy was his father’s name spelled Mahaveer on his voter identity card against Mahavir on the record, which required a correction and a fresh hearing.

    What has gone wrong on the administrative side?

    1. Volume against capacity: Between 100 and 1,000 people attend each hearing location daily, around 500 cases are scheduled each day at the Rajouri Garden centre, and of 300 people scheduled on a given day only 120 to 130 cases are processed.
    2. Slots that do not hold: Hearings run in three slots to 5 p.m., and electors in early slots wait into the evening, with some turned away and rescheduled without a hearing.
    3. Notice generation outpacing service: 7,000 notices were generated at one centre covering 50 booths of Chandni Chowk, with Booth Level Officers still in the field serving them.
    4. Training deficit at the base: A Booth Level Officer from North East Delhi said training was minimal, and the Assistant Electoral Registration Officer attributed the volume of notices to Booth Level Officers not having done the verification properly in the first place.
    5. Scheduling errors: One elector was served a notice for a hearing on a date the same centre was hosting the UPSC and NDA entrance examination.
    6. Access problems in both directions: Officers report households in bungalows not opening their doors, which pushes service onto WhatsApp, and women appointed from school teaching are required to conduct door to door verification.

    What rights questions does the process raise?

    1. Consent for phone numbers: Officials directed applicants to write mobile numbers on forms where the field was optional, which raises the question of whether voter identity records are being linked to phone numbers without consent.
    2. Consent for photographs: A digital rights activist who was himself served a notice has questioned whether consent was taken for photographing electors at hearing centres, and plans to file an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005.
    3. Conduct at the centre: An official at Rajouri Garden threatened to lodge a First Information Report against a woman who approached the dais to ask when she would be called, after she had waited for hours.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The burden of proof is inverted: An existing elector must re establish an entitlement the state has already recognised, rather than the administration having to state a ground for removing the name. Eg. Electors in Delhi who had voted across several cycles received notices for a missing 2002 roll entry.
      The Fix: Require the registration officer to record a specific stated ground for each proposed deletion and disclose it to the elector before the hearing.
    2. The document list excludes what the poor hold: Eleven prescribed proofs leave out the records most commonly held by informal workers, and the most widely held identity document does not count on its own. Eg. A school leaving certificate was refused for carrying no date of birth field.
      The Fix: Add a residual clause admitting any government issued record of age or residence, with the officer recording written reasons for any refusal.
    3. Migrant electors fail the mapping test by design: A worker enrolled at the place of work has no relative on that place’s older roll, so the unmapped flag is triggered by migration itself rather than by ineligibility. Eg. The Election Commission demonstrated a remote voting machine prototype in 2023 precisely because domestic migrants lose their vote on moving.
      The Fix: Accept a verified entry from the roll of the elector’s district of origin as satisfying the mapping requirement.
    4. Documentary proof of parentage edges into citizenship determination: A revision that turns on proving birth and descent approaches a citizenship test, which the Citizenship Act, 1955 assigns to a different authority. Eg. The National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam, published in 2019, excluded about 19 lakh people and left their status unresolved for years.
      The Fix: Confine the revision to identity and residence at the registered address, and route any citizenship doubt to the authority the Citizenship Act, 1955 names.

    Conclusion

    The dispute is no longer about whether a roll should be cleaned but about who carries the cost of proving it is clean. A process that treats an unmapped record as a presumption against the elector shifts that cost onto daily wage households that lose a day’s income for each hearing, while a clerical spelling difference and a missing date of birth field carry the same consequence as an absent claim. The two things that cannot both hold are a documentary standard set at 2002 level records and an electorate whose poorest members have never held such records. The disposal deadline of 29 October and the final roll on 4 November are the dates on which that is settled for Delhi.

    Back2Basics: Booth Level Officer (BLO)

    1. What the office is: A Booth Level Officer is the Election Commission’s grassroots functionary, responsible for the electoral roll of a single polling booth.
    2. Appointment: BLOs are appointed by the Electoral Registration Officer under Section 13B(2) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the system was introduced by the Election Commission in 2006.
    3. Who serves: The role is filled by local government or semi government staff, typically school teachers, anganwadi workers, patwaris and panchayat secretaries.
    4. What the office does: House to house verification of electors, collection and scrutiny of enrolment, deletion and correction forms, and service of notices issued by the Electoral Registration Officer.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “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?”

  • ‘Over 37 lakh SIR appeals still pending in Bengal tribunals’

    Why in the News

    The Election Commission of India has informed the Supreme Court that 37,18,452 of a total 38,20,683 appeals arising out of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal are still pending before 19 Appellate Tribunals, with only 1,02,231 disposed of. The affidavit, covering appeals across 24 districts, was filed after the Court ordered the Commission to produce the data. Petitioners had complained that pendency and disposal rates were not in the public domain at all, and had relied on a Right to Information (RTI) reply from the election authorities to raise the issue. More than six months have passed since the Court constituted the Appellate Tribunals. The tension is that municipal elections in the State are approaching while the status of most appellants on the roll is undecided, and the Commission’s position is that the working of the tribunals is not its responsibility.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision and what does the appeal route do?

    1. What the revision is: A Special Intensive Revision is a house to house verification exercise in which the existing electoral roll is rebuilt rather than merely corrected, so every elector must establish eligibility afresh.
    2. What it produces: It generates two classes of change, inclusions of new names and exclusions of existing ones, and both are open to challenge.
    3. The appeal route in this case: Appeals arising from the West Bengal exercise lie to 19 Appellate Tribunals constituted by the Supreme Court, which sit alongside the ordinary appellate route to the District Magistrate and then the Chief Electoral Officer.
    4. Why the appeal matters more than usual: A name kept off the roll when the roll is used is off the roll for that election, whatever the appeal later decides, so the timing of the decision carries the same weight as its content.

    What do the pendency figures show?

    1. The aggregate: 38,20,683 appeals were submitted regarding both inclusions and exclusions of voters during the revision.
    2. What has been decided: Only 1,02,231 appeals have been disposed of, which is under three in every hundred filed.
    3. Time elapsed: The tribunals have been in existence for over six months, so the backlog is not a start up delay.
    4. Spread of the caseload: The affidavit, dated 16 September, carries annexures giving separate district by district statistics across all 24 districts.

    What do the district figures reveal about disposal capacity?

    1. Murshidabad: 7,47,921 appeals were filed and only 514 were decided.
    2. Uttar Dinajpur: 3,03,155 appeals are pending, with 9,104 disposed of, which is the strongest district performance on the record.
    3. Purba Bardhaman: Out of 2,80,029 appeals, only 131 had been decided by the tribunals.
    4. What the spread means: Disposal is not tracking caseload anywhere, so the backlog reflects the capacity of the forum rather than the difficulty of particular districts.

    Who actually filed these appeals?

    1. Appeals by excluded voters: Only about seven lakh of the appeals were filed by voters who had been left off the roll and are seeking re inclusion.
    2. Appeals seeking further exclusion: The remaining 31 lakh were filed either by the Commission itself or by other objectors seeking to exclude more people from the West Bengal electoral roll.
    3. Why the split changes the problem: A single undifferentiated queue means an appeal that would restore a voter waits behind appeals that would remove others, so delay operates in one direction only.

    What has the Court asked for, and what is the Commission’s position?

    1. The direction on data: The Court directed the Commission to file an affidavit segregating the number of appeals filed by ousted voters seeking re inclusion from those filed by parties wanting more voters excluded.
    2. The direction on process: The Bench also asked the Commission to consider a mechanism for updating and streamlining the progress of pending appeals before the tribunals.
    3. The open question on priority: The Bench, headed by the Chief Justice of India, sought the breakup by nature of appeal before deciding whether appeals by disenfranchised voters seeking re inclusion should be prioritised.
    4. The Commission’s distancing: The affidavit said the appellate mechanism and its accessibility fall within the standard operating procedures governing these fora and the authorities entrusted with their administration, and that the “feasibility, modalities and implementation” of any streamlining measure are best left to the Appellate Tribunal concerned rather than being made the subject of directions against the Commission.

    Challenges to the SIR appellate process

    1. Disposal capacity measured against the electoral calendar: A forum that clears under three per cent of its caseload in six months settles the roll by inaction rather than by decision. Eg. Municipal elections in West Bengal fall due while the overwhelming majority of appellants have no order either way.
      The Fix: Fix a statutory outer limit for deciding each appeal, running from the date of filing and enforceable before the roll’s final publication.
    2. No public tracking of progress: Figures on filing and disposal reached the record only through litigation, so an appellant cannot see where their own matter stands. Eg. The district annexures were produced only after the Court ordered the Commission to file segregated data.
      The Fix: Publish a dashboard of appeals filed, decided and pending for each tribunal, updated at fixed intervals.
    3. Diffused responsibility for tribunal performance: Where the Commission treats the tribunals’ working as a matter for the authorities administering them, no single body answers for the backlog. Eg. The appellate mechanism runs on standard operating procedures rather than on a statutory timeline with a named accountable officer.
      The Fix: Designate one nodal authority answerable for tribunal disposal rates, reporting to the Court at fixed intervals.
    4. Undifferentiated queueing of opposite claims: Appeals that would restore a name and appeals that would remove one sit in the same line, so the voter already off the roll bears the whole cost of delay. Eg. Roughly four in five appeals on the record seek further exclusions rather than restoration.
      The Fix: Split the docket into two tracks and decide re inclusion appeals before the date of final publication of the roll.

    Conclusion

    The dispute has shifted away from the revision itself. What is now contested is whether the remedy built to correct the revision can operate at the speed the electoral calendar demands, because an appeal undecided when the roll is used produces the same result as an appeal dismissed. The Commission has placed responsibility for the tribunals’ working with the tribunals and their administering authorities, and the Court has not yet placed it anywhere else. The thing to watch is whether the Court orders re inclusion appeals to be heard first, which is the question it framed and left open.

    Back2Basics: Representation of the People Act, 1950

    1. What it governs: It deals with the allocation of seats in the Lok Sabha and State legislatures, delimitation of constituencies, qualifications of voters, and the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.
    2. How it differs from the 1951 Act: The Representation of the People Act, 1951 governs the actual conduct of elections, qualifications and disqualifications of candidates, corrupt practices and election disputes, so rolls sit in the 1950 Act and polls in the 1951 Act.
    3. Revision of rolls: Section 21 provides for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls, including a special revision of a constituency or part of one for reasons to be recorded.
    4. The ordinary appeal route: Section 24 allows an appeal against an order of the Electoral Registration Officer to the District Magistrate, and from there to the Chief Electoral Officer of the State.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10] 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?”

  • Missing in EC affidavit on SIR in Bengal: Break-up of appeals for name inclusion

    Why in the News

    The Election Commission of India (EC) has told the Supreme Court that only 1,02,231 of the 38,20,683 appeals filed against deletions and inclusions in the West Bengal Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls have been disposed of, leaving 37,18,452 pending five months after the Court ordered appellate tribunals began working. The affidavit did not carry the one thing the Court had asked for, a break up of the appeals by ground, meaning how many were filed by the 27.16 lakh deleted electors seeking to get back on the rolls and how many were filed by the poll panel against inclusion of names. That break up is not a formality. A Bench hearing the West Bengal petitions had said in August that an exclusion denudes a voting right while an inclusion does not affect an individual right, so the two categories should be prioritised differently and the tribunals’ burden reduced accordingly. Without the break up, the Court cannot order that prioritisation, and the pending stock stays undifferentiated.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls?

    1. About: An intensive revision rebuilds the electoral roll by requiring electors to establish eligibility afresh, rather than only adding and deleting names against the existing roll.
    2. How a name moves: Enrolment is sought through Form 6, the statutory form for voter registration, and deletion is sought through Form 7.
    3. Scale of the current exercise: The revision was under way in nine States and three Union Territories from October 2025.
    4. What makes West Bengal different: Noting the trust deficit between the Commission and the then State government, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of ordering that the eligibility of electors in the State be adjudicated by judicial officers rather than by electoral registration machinery alone.

    How was the West Bengal appellate mechanism built?

    1. Judicial adjudication first: Around 700 judicial officers decided the eligibility of the 60.06 lakh electors the Commission had marked “under adjudication”.
    2. The outcome of that adjudication: The officers ordered the deletion of 27.16 lakh names and the inclusion of 32.9 lakh.
    3. An appeal layer was then ordered: The Supreme Court directed on 10 March that an appellate mechanism be set up so that anyone aggrieved by a judicial officer’s order had a route to challenge it.
    4. The tribunals themselves: The Commission notified 19 appellate tribunals on 20 March, each consisting of a single retired High Court judge, and they began functioning on 13 April.

    What do the appeal numbers show?

    1. The stock is close to untouched: Disposal stands at a fraction of the appeals filed, and the overwhelming majority remain pending after five months of working tribunals.
    2. Capacity against volume: Nineteen tribunals, each a single judge, carry the entire appellate load of a State wide revision.
    3. The proceeding that produced the figures: The Commission filed the counter affidavit in answer to a July notice on a petition by a West Bengal Congress leader seeking details of pending appeals and of additions and deletions to the rolls.

    Why does the missing break up matter to the Court?

    1. The two categories are not equivalent: An exclusion takes away an existing voting right, while an inclusion does not take away anything from an individual, which is why the Court wanted them separated.
    2. Prioritisation is the practical remedy the Court was examining: Separating the categories would let exclusion appeals be heard first and would bring down the tribunals’ burden to some extent.
    3. The Commission was asked directly: The Bench told counsel for the Commission in August to get the data on the nature of the appeals filed, whether for inclusion or for exclusion, before it took a call.
    4. What the affidavit supplied instead: The affidavit gave totals filed, disposed of and pending, with no split by ground of appeal.

    What does the rest of the Commission’s data say about the roll?

    1. Enrolment applications: From the publication of the SIR draft roll on 17 December 2025 until 7 August, 34.13 lakh Form 6 applications were filed, covering both first time applicants and those among the 58.20 lakh electors deleted at the draft stage.
    2. Disposal of those applications: 4.86 lakh forms were unprocessed, 7.26 lakh enrolment forms were rejected and 14,079 were accepted.
    3. Deletion applications: 6.39 lakh Form 7 applications were filed, of which 14,506 were rejected and 3,355 were accepted.

    What do the gender ratio and the elector population ratio indicate?

    1. Gender ratio before the revision: The number of female electors per 1,000 male electors stood at 969 on 1 January 2025 and rose to 970 by 27 October 2025, the day the revision was announced in the State.
    2. Gender ratio during the revision: The ratio fell to 956 in the draft roll of 16 December 2025, and recovered only partly to 964 in the final SIR roll published on 28 February.
    3. Elector population ratio, and what it measures: The elector population ratio (EP ratio) is the number of electors per 100 people, and it is used as a check on the health of a roll, since the elector count should sit close to the population above 18 years.
    4. Where West Bengal now stands: Against a projected population of 10.40 crore, the State has 6.44 crore electors, giving an EP ratio of 62 electors per 100 population, below the 66.76 recorded for the country at the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

    Challenges to the SIR appellate process

    1. Capacity was fixed before the volume was known: The number of tribunals was notified in March, before the scale of appeals emerged, and it has not moved since. Eg. Each tribunal is a single retired High Court judge covering several districts of the State.
      The Fix: Tie the number of tribunals to the district wise stock of pending appeals, with a per tribunal monthly disposal norm reviewed each quarter.
    2. The burden of proof sits on the deleted elector: The appellate route opens only after a judicial officer has already ruled against the person, so the elector must produce documents the revision itself found insufficient. Eg. The statutory route back on to the roll is a fresh Form 6, and rejections of such forms in the State run into lakhs.
      The Fix: Allow a tribunal to call for the electoral registration record of the previous roll on its own motion, so an old entry is evidence the elector does not have to reproduce.
    3. An appeal decided after a poll restores nothing: A vote missed because a name was wrongly deleted cannot be returned by a later favourable order. Eg. Bypolls in the State are due on 6 October while the pending stock runs into tens of lakhs.
      The Fix: Require appeals from any constituency going to poll to be decided before the last date for nominations in that constituency.

    Conclusion

    The appellate mechanism was created to give a wrongly deleted elector a way back, and its output so far is a small fraction of its intake. The Court’s proposed remedy was not more tribunals but a triage that puts exclusions first, and that remedy is blocked by the absence of a single dataset the Commission has not filed. Until the break up by ground of appeal is placed on record, the Court cannot order prioritisation and the pending stock stays undifferentiated. The next hearing, and whether the Commission files that break up before it, is the point to watch.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2017, GS2, 15] To enhance the quality of democracy in India the Election Commission of India has proposed electoral reforms in 2016. What are the suggested reforms and how far are they significant to make democracy successful?”

  • SIR deletions: elector numbers in 1/3 of Delhi below poll turnout

    Why in the News

    In 24 of Delhi’s 70 Assembly constituencies, the draft roll produced by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) now carries fewer electors than the number of people who actually voted in the February 2025 Assembly election. The 2025 election was conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) itself on a roll of 1.56 crore electors, of whom 94.9 lakh voted. Roughly 58.5 lakh names have been removed since, leaving 97.5 lakh electors in the draft roll. The tension is arithmetical before it is legal: an electoral roll smaller than the last verified turnout implies either migration on an implausible scale or deletions that have removed electors who remain ordinarily resident.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

    1. What it is: It is a house-to-house re-verification of the electoral roll, conducted in phases across States and Union Territories, that rebuilds the roll rather than amending it at the margins.
    2. What an elector must do: The draft enumeration process requires electors to list their Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers and their eligibility to vote.
    3. Status of the output: What is published at the end of enumeration is a draft roll, not the final roll, so time remains for additions.
    4. Two routes to addition: Freshly eligible electors may be added, and electors erroneously deleted may seek restoration through claims and objections.

    What do the Delhi numbers show, and how thin is the buffer?

    1. The starting roll: The rolls carried 1.56 crore electors before the Delhi Assembly polls of February 2025, of whom 94.9 lakh voted.
    2. Two rounds of culling: Close to 11 lakh electors were deleted before the SIR, and nearly 47.6 lakh more during the draft SIR phase, a total of over 58.5 lakh names.
    3. What is left: The draft roll carries 97.5 lakh electors for the Union Territory.
    4. The buffer that remains: The 94.9 lakh who voted are 97% of the draft roll, leaving a “buffer” of only about 2.6 lakh electors, or 2.6%, to account for every ordinary resident who did not vote.
    5. The implied turnout: If every deletion since the Assembly polls is legitimate, the hypothetical turnout percentage on the draft roll works out to an implausible 97%.

    Which constituencies were cut deepest?

    1. The worst case: Tughlakabad’s draft roll carries 1,00,386 electors against 1,14,961 who actually voted in 2025, a shortfall of 14,575.
    2. How many seats are affected: 24 constituencies show fewer electors than 2025 turnout, and 15 of them carry the largest shortfalls. Eg. Sangam Vihar with 1,25,723 actual voters, Badli with 1,50,889 and Dwarka with 1,39,564.
    3. Where they cluster: The pattern is most pronounced in the eastern, central and southern parts of Delhi, and is highest in the seats beyond the Yamuna on the east.

    What would have to be true for the deletions to hold?

    1. Universal turnout among residents: Everyone deemed an “ordinary resident” in these 24 constituencies would have to have voted in 2025.
    2. Mass departure of voters: A significant share of those who did vote would have to have left the constituency since.
    3. Non-voters never resident: Those who did not vote in 2025 would have to have been non-resident then, or to have ceased to be resident since.
    4. Migration on an implausible scale: Taken together, these constituencies would have to have seen inward and outward migration of enormous scale in the 17 months between the polls and the start of the SIR, and there are no signs any of that happened.
    5. Self-declared ineligibility: Since enumeration requires electors to state their EPIC number and their eligibility, it stretches reason to assume recent voters declared themselves ineligible.

    Does the pattern extend beyond Delhi?

    1. Buffer shrinks by phase: The practice of leaving a small buffer of electors is more marked for States and Union Territories revised in Phase 3 of the SIR than in the earlier phases.
    2. Phase 3 figures: Andhra Pradesh retains a buffer of 8.8%, Karnataka 13.1% and Maharashtra 16.2%.
    3. Delhi as the outlier: Delhi’s 2.6% buffer is the narrowest recorded, making it the worst case of the phase.
    4. What a narrow buffer indicates: A thin buffer points to aggressive deletion and to the potential disenfranchisement of eligible electors, since it leaves almost no room for residents who simply did not vote.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. Burden of proof shifted to the elector: A citizen already on a roll used for a completed election must re-establish eligibility or lose the vote. Eg. Delhi’s draft roll dropped 58.5 lakh names from a roll the Commission itself used in February 2025.
      The Fix: Require a recorded, individually served reason for every deletion, with the elector’s response window running from the date of service rather than from publication of the draft.
    2. Compressed timelines: Phase-wise revision on short schedules leaves little time for claims and objections to be heard on their merits. Eg. The buffer narrowed steadily from Phase 1 to Phase 3, with Delhi the narrowest at 2.6%.
      The Fix: Fix a minimum claims-and-objections period proportionate to the number of deletions in a constituency rather than a uniform calendar window.
    3. No published audit of deletion grounds: Aggregate deletion counts are released without a category-wise break-up of death, shifting or duplication. Eg. Delhi’s 58.5 lakh removals are reported as a pre-SIR figure and an SIR-phase figure with no stated ground-wise split.
      The Fix: Publish constituency-level deletion data disaggregated by statutory ground, so the roll can be audited against civil registration and migration records.
    4. Weak field verification capacity: Booth level officers handle large workloads within short revision cycles, so verification quality varies across constituencies. Eg. Deletions clustered in the eastern, central and southern parts of Delhi rather than spreading evenly.
      The Fix: Mandate supervisory re-verification of a random sample of deletions in every constituency before the draft roll is published.
    5. Contested scope of the exercise: Whether the revision may examine questions beyond ordinary residence is disputed and unsettled. Eg. The enumeration form requires electors to state both their EPIC number and their eligibility.
      The Fix: Issue a public instruction confining the Commission’s enquiry to the statutory grounds for inclusion and deletion under the Representation of the People Act, 1950.

    Conclusion

    A roll smaller than the last verified turnout is not evidence of one wrong deletion; it is evidence that the method that produced it needs auditing. The draft stage still allows both freshly eligible electors and wrongly deleted ones to be added, so the number that matters is the final roll and not this one. The measure to watch is the size of the buffer in Delhi’s final roll against the 2.6% the draft leaves, and whether the Phase 3 States now revising show the same narrowing.

    Back2Basics: Electoral Photo Identity Card

    1. What it is: A photo identity document issued by the Election Commission of India to a registered elector, carrying a unique EPIC number.
    2. When it began: Issue of the card started in 1993 to reduce impersonation and duplicate entries in electoral rolls.
    3. What it does not prove: It is proof of enrolment on a roll and is not proof of citizenship or of residence in itself.
    4. Use in this revision: The SIR enumeration form is keyed to the EPIC number, which is how an existing elector is matched to the rebuilt roll.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “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?”

  • SIR: deletions have increased in Phase 3 States/UT

    Why in the News

    Phase 3 of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has removed 6.15 crore names, or 17.1 percent, from the draft rolls of 17 States and Union Territories. The first two phases, covering 13 States and Union Territories, removed 12.3 percent at the same stage, so the current phase runs 4.8 percentage points higher. The Election Commission has offered no reason for the increase. Deletions recorded as Permanently Shifted or Untraceable and Absent have risen as a share of the total, while those recorded as Deceased or Duplicate have fallen. The contested point is whether a process applied uniformly across States can produce this spread of outcomes between phases.

    What is a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. Special Intensive Revision: It is a house to house re verification of electors in which a fresh roll is prepared, rather than the existing roll being amended entry by entry.
    2. Statutory basis: Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 lets the Election Commission direct a special revision of the roll for any constituency at any time, for reasons it records in writing.
    3. The sequence: Enumeration produces the draft roll. A period for claims and objections then runs before the final roll is published.
    4. The phases so far: Bihar was the only State in Phase 1, 12 more States and Union Territories followed in Phase 2, and 19 are in the Phase 3 schedule.

    How much larger are the Phase 3 deletions?

    1. Phase 3 totals: The rolls of 17 States and Union Territories held 36.1 crore voters before the revision and 29.9 crore in the draft rolls.
    2. The earlier phases: The 13 States and Union Territories of Phases 1 and 2 went from 58.9 crore voters to 51.7 crore, a deletion of 7.22 crore names.
    3. Phase 1 alone: Bihar’s roll fell from 7.9 crore to 7.2 crore, a deletion of 0.65 crore names or 8.28 percent, and its final roll stood at 7.4 crore.
    4. Coverage of the figures: Two of the 19 Phase 3 States and Union Territories, Nagaland and Tripura, have not completed enumeration, so the totals cover 17.
    5. The draft is close to the final: Net deletions across the first two phases moved only from 12.3 percent in the draft rolls to 10.5 percent in the final rolls, so the Phase 3 figure is unlikely to fall far.
    6. States above the earlier range: Among States and Union Territories holding at least one crore voters before the revision, only Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh crossed 15 percent in the first two phases. Six crossed it in Phase 3, and four of them, Delhi, Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, deleted 20 percent or more.

    Why does urbanisation not explain the jump?

    1. The urbanisation reading: Phase 3 covers several heavily urbanised States, and high urban mobility is the explanation that would account for more entries marked absent or shifted.
    2. Urbanised States in the earlier phase: Tamil Nadu, Keralam and Gujarat are also heavily urbanised and recorded no comparable rise when they were revised in Phase 2.
    3. City level comparison: Deletions in Hyderabad, Mumbai and Bengaluru were of a higher magnitude than those in Chennai or Ahmedabad.
    4. The rural comparison: Jharkhand, which is not urbanised, deleted 16.5 percent in Phase 3, against 12.9 percent in Chhattisgarh in Phase 2.

    What has changed in the reasons recorded against each deletion?

    1. The four recorded reasons: A deletion is entered as Absent or Shifted, Deceased, Duplicate, or Others.
    2. The shift between categories: The share recorded as Permanently Shifted or Untraceable and Absent has risen across the phases, and the share recorded as Deceased or Duplicate has fallen correspondingly.
    3. Why the category matters: A death or a duplicate entry is checkable against a record that exists independently of the enumerator. Absence is an inference drawn at the door and leaves no document behind it.
    4. The Others category: Press statements by Chief Electoral Officers account for about 9.73 lakh names under Others, and more States are using the category in Phase 3.
    5. The category is missing from the lists: The full deletion lists for Delhi, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana carry not one person marked Others, indicating those names were clubbed under Absent instead.
    6. What uniform application would imply: A process defined and applied identically across States would not produce this divergence in the reasons recorded against deleted names.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. Absence is recorded without a verifiable record: A deletion marked Untraceable or Absent rests on an enumerator not finding the elector at the address, which no document either proves or disproves. Eg. Seasonal migration from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh to construction sites in Delhi and Mumbai keeps workers away from their registered address for months at a stretch.
      The Fix: Require a second visit on a different date and a signed attestation from the local body before an absence deletion is entered.
    2. No published account of what changed between phases: The Election Commission has recorded a sharp jump in the deletion rate and in the reasons used without stating what changed in the instructions or the procedure. Eg. The phase wise data itself had to be assembled from Commission and State Chief Electoral Officer websites rather than from any explanatory note.
      The Fix: Publish the enumerator instructions issued for each phase, with any mid process revision to them dated and recorded.
    3. The correction mechanism depends on the elector noticing: A deletion is reversed through claims and objections, which requires the affected person to learn that the name is gone. Eg. An elector who has migrated is the least likely to see a draft roll published at the address they left.
      The Fix: Serve an individual notice by post and to the registered mobile number for every proposed deletion, carrying the reason recorded against the name.
    4. A citizenship question rides on an administrative exercise: An intensive revision asks an existing elector to establish eligibility afresh, and eligibility includes citizenship, which the electoral machinery is not equipped to adjudicate. Eg. Section 16 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 disqualifies a non citizen from registration, while determination of citizenship itself sits under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
      The Fix: Confine the enumerator to recording documents and refer any citizenship doubt to the authority designated under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
    5. Timing against the election calendar: A revision concluded close to a poll leaves an excluded elector little room to be restored before voting. Eg. Bihar’s revision ran through the months immediately preceding its Assembly election.
      The Fix: Fix a minimum interval between publication of the final roll and the last date for nominations, so restoration remains possible.

    Conclusion

    A roll revision is judged by whether the people removed from it had genuinely ceased to be entitled to be on it, and that judgement rests entirely on the reason recorded against each name. The unresolved tension is between a process described as uniformly applied and outcomes that differ sharply between phases, with no published account of what changed in between. The marker to watch is the Phase 3 final roll, since the movement between draft and final is the only available measure of how many of these removals survive scrutiny.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “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?”

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

    Why in the News

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

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

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

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

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

    Why can citizenship not be settled in the field?

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

    What would an Aadhaar based revision actually do?

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

    Does the existing record of face authentication support the claim?

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

    Challenges to an Aadhaar based electoral roll revision

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

    Conclusion

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

    Electoral Roll Management in India

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

    Government Initiatives on Electoral Roll Management

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

    Back2Basics

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

    Matching Previous Year Question

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

  • SIR: Glaring oddities in Maharashtra’s deletion patterns

    Why in the News

    The draft roll published on 31 August under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has dropped 2.07 crore electors from Maharashtra’s 288 Assembly Constituencies (ACs), which is 21.14 per cent of the 9.79 crore electors carried on the rolls before the revision. That single State figure is larger than the entire electorate of Chhattisgarh, and larger than the 2.04 crore deletions recorded during the same revision in Uttar Pradesh, a State with 13.4 crore electors. The Election Commission of India (EC) has not released the Elector to Population (EP) ratio for any State during the revision, though its own Manual on Electoral Rolls requires that disclosure during and after every revision. The contest is therefore not over whether a roll needed cleaning but over whether a deletion of one in five electors, justified largely by two blanket reasons, can be checked at all while the one ratio designed to check it is withheld.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. Rebuilding the roll by fresh enumeration: An intensive revision rebuilds the electoral roll through a fresh house to house enumeration rather than adding and removing names against the existing roll, so every elector has to be re accounted for.
    2. The enumeration phase and the draft roll: The enumeration phase collects forms from electors, and the draft roll published at the end of it shows who survived enumeration and who was deleted, with a reason recorded against each deletion.

    What is the Elector to Population ratio?

    1. What the ratio measures: The Elector to Population ratio expresses enrolled electors as a share of the population old enough to vote in the same area, so it converts a raw roll count into a figure that can be compared across constituencies of different sizes.
    2. The benchmark it is read against: Official projections for the 18 plus age group give an expected number of electors for an area, which supplies a comparison derived independently of the roll being tested.
    3. What a low ratio signals: A roll sitting far below the ratio implied by those projections is evidence of under enrolment rather than of a cleaner roll, since removing duplicate and deceased entries does not pull the total below the eligible population.
    4. The disclosure obligation attached to it: The Election Commission’s Manual on Electoral Rolls requires the ratio to be disclosed during and after every revision, which makes it the audit built into the revision rather than an external check on it.

    How large is the deletion, measured against the roll itself?

    1. Names deleted and names retained: 2,06,88,487 names were deleted from a pre revision roll of 9,78,54,049, leaving 7,71,65,562 electors in the draft roll.
    2. Comparison with Uttar Pradesh: The deletion exceeds Uttar Pradesh’s, and the draft rolls of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi combined hold fewer electors than Uttar Pradesh alone.
    3. The gap against projected population: Set against a projected voter population of 9,65,00,000, the draft roll is short by 1,93,34,438 electors, about 20 per cent.
    4. The Technical Group on Population Projections: That population estimate is the 18 plus age group projection from the Government of India’s Technical Group on Population Projections, not an independent construction.
    5. Deletion size against shortfall size: The shortfall against projected population is roughly the same size as the deletion, so the revision has removed almost exactly the number of electors that a demographic estimate says the roll should have retained.

    Where are the deletions concentrated?

    1. Urban concentration of the deletions: About 75 per cent of all deletions occurred in the 147 constituencies classified as highly or moderately urban.
    2. The clustering by district: Almost all of the heaviest deleting constituencies lie in and around Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Nashik.
    3. Constituencies at the extremes: 58 ACs lost at least a third of their names and 25 ACs lost 40 per cent or more, with Bhiwandi East in Thane the highest at 49.1 per cent.
    4. Night time light classification of constituencies: Constituencies were sorted into urban and rural using night time light intensity from the Socio economic High resolution Rural Urban Geographic Platform for India (SHRUG), a public geographic database maintained by the Development Data Lab, read off 2023 satellite data.
    5. Akole, the lowest deleting constituency: Akole in Ahmednagar recorded the lowest share of deletions against its pre revision roll.

    What do the recorded reasons for deletion show?

    1. Permanently Shifted and Untraceable or Absent: Permanently Shifted and Untraceable or Absent were applied as blanket categories across large numbers of names.
    2. Kalyan Rural in Thane: Kalyan Rural in Thane lost 2,52,247 names, 46 per cent of its roll, of which 2.39 lakh, or 96.5 per cent, were marked shifted or absent, against only 4,882 marked Deceased.
    3. The 85 constituency cluster: In 85 ACs shifted and absent accounted for between 75 per cent and 96.5 per cent of all deletions. Those 85 constituencies held 3.21 crore electors before the revision and lost 1.17 crore, of which 97.9 lakh were marked shifted or absent.
    4. The Manual’s bar on deleting an absentee: The EC’s own manual states that an absentee voter cannot be deleted, because that elector continues to be an ordinary resident of the place where enrolled.
    5. The Chief Electoral Officer’s definition of Absent: An explanatory note issued by the Chief Electoral Officer of Maharashtra defines Absent as meaning that the elector was unavailable, which is a condition of the enumerator’s visit rather than a finding about residence.

    Why does the variation between similar constituencies matter?

    1. Pune’s 21 constituencies: In Pune’s 21 ACs, the share of deletions marked Absent ranged from 0.4 per cent to 88.3 per cent.
    2. Nashik, Palghar, Aurangabad and Nagpur: Nashik’s 15 ACs ranged from 8.1 per cent to 86.5 per cent, Palghar’s six from 3.3 per cent to 85.5 per cent, Aurangabad’s nine from 7.3 per cent to 67.3 per cent and Nagpur’s 12 from 4.4 per cent to 59.7 per cent.
    3. Maval and Hadapsar: Maval marked just 322 names, 0.4 per cent, as Absent while marking over 77,000 as shifted, and Hadapsar marked 86 per cent of its 2.98 lakh deleted voters as absent.
    4. The Deceased and Duplicate shares: Across a sample of constituencies the share of deletions recorded as Deceased runs from 1.9 per cent to nearly 45 per cent, and the share recorded as Duplicate from 1.3 per cent to about 25 per cent.
    5. Enumerator practice as the source of the spread: Constituencies of similar urban or rural character, inside one district, were processed under reasons applied arbitrarily and interchangeably, which points to the enumerator’s practice rather than to any underlying difference in the electors.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls

    1. Deletion is the default outcome of a re enumeration: Rebuilding a roll from scratch places the burden of proof on the elector, so anyone missed at the door is removed rather than retained. Eg. In 85 Maharashtra constituencies, shifted and absent together accounted for up to 96.5 per cent of all deletions.
      The Fix: Require a second visit and a recorded notice to the elector’s address before any name is deleted for absence, so a missed visit cannot by itself end an enrolment.
    2. The categories used are not verifiable after the fact: Shifted and Untraceable record what the enumerator could not find, not a fact about the elector, so a wrongly recorded deletion leaves no trace to audit. Eg. The Chief Electoral Officer’s own note defines Absent as the elector being unavailable.
      The Fix: Publish the booth level list of deletions with the reason and the date of the enumerator’s visit, so a deletion can be contested against a record rather than against a category.
    3. Withholding the mandated ratio removes the only aggregate check: The Elector to Population ratio is what tells a reader whether a revision corrected the roll or thinned it, and no substitute measure exists. Eg. The estimated ratio for Maharashtra shows the draft roll short by 1.92 crore electors.
      The Fix: Release the ratio constituency by constituency at draft publication, as the Manual on Electoral Rolls already requires, rather than after the claims and objections period closes.
    4. Urban electors are structurally easier to delete: Rented accommodation, migrant work and multi storey buildings make an occupant harder to locate on a single visit than a settled rural household. Eg. About 75 per cent of Maharashtra’s deletions fell in the 147 highly or moderately urban constituencies.
      The Fix: Allow urban electors to complete enumeration through a self service digital submission verified against an existing identity record, so presence at the door is not the only route to staying on the roll.
    5. The claims and objections window assumes the deleted elector knows: A person removed from the roll usually discovers it at the polling station, by which time the remedy has expired. Eg. Deletions in Maharashtra ran to 2.07 crore names, which no individual notice system currently covers.
      The Fix: Send a mandatory individual intimation by post and message to every deleted elector at the address on record, with the reason and the deadline for restoration stated.
    6. Roll revision decides delimitation and reservation downstream: Electoral rolls feed constituency sizes, reserved seat calculations and future revision baselines, so an error does not stay inside one election. Eg. The Maharashtra draft roll now sits 20 per cent below the projected 18 plus population used by official population projections.
      The Fix: Freeze the revised roll as a baseline only after an independent statistical audit against the Technical Group’s population projections has been published.

    Conclusion

    The revision has produced a roll that is smaller than the population estimate by almost exactly the number of names it removed, and the reasons recorded for those removals swing from near zero to near universal between constituencies that are otherwise alike. What settles the dispute is not another analysis of the draft but a single disclosure the revising authority is already obliged to make. The marker to watch is whether the Elector to Population ratio is published constituency by constituency before the claims and objections period closes, since restoration after the final roll is published is a different and far harder remedy.

    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?”

  • How should RUPPs be regulated?

    Why in the News

    Six Registered Unrecognised Political Parties (RUPP) based in Gujarat received donations of about Rs 1,700 crore in the 2023 to 2024 financial year. A RUPP is a party registered with the Election Commission of India (EC) that has not met the vote and seat tests for recognition as a State or a national party. That single figure exceeds the Rs 1,480 crore received in the same period by five nationally recognised parties other than the Bharatiya Janata Party. The six remain on the list of active parties because they fielded candidates in the last general election. Registration brings tax exemption and a common symbol, and the law gives the Election Commission almost no power to remove a party that does nothing else.

    What is a Registered Unrecognised Political Party?

    1. The registering provision: Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (RP Act) sets out the requirements for registering a political party with the Election Commission.
    2. How registration happens: The Commission registers a party as a RUPP after satisfactory scrutiny of the documents submitted to it.
    3. Tax exemption on donations: Donations received are exempt under Section 12 of the Income Tax Act, 2025.
    4. Electoral privileges: A RUPP gets a common symbol for contesting general elections to the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies, and is allowed 20 star campaigners during a campaign.

    What must a RUPP disclose, and what follows if it does not?

    1. Donor records above a threshold: Details of individual donors giving more than twenty thousand rupees in a financial year must be maintained and submitted to the Election Commission every year.
    2. The penalty for non disclosure: Under Section 29C of the RP Act, failure to furnish those details results in loss of income tax exemption.
    3. A cap on cash: Donations above two thousand rupees may be accepted only by cheque or bank transfer under the Income Tax Act, 2025.

    Why do parties that never seriously contest stay on the register?

    1. The gap between registration and contest: India had more than 2,800 RUPPs as of July, and only around 750 contested the 2024 general elections.
    2. The label that followed: The remainder are described as “letter pad parties”, since registration is all they maintain.
    3. No power to deregister: The RP Act confers no explicit power on the Election Commission to remove a party from the register for failing to contest elections, hold internal elections or lodge required returns.
    4. The position in law: In Indian National Congress v. Institute of Social Welfare and Others (2002) the Supreme Court held that the Commission has no power to deregister a political party under the RP Act.
    5. The narrow exceptions: Removal is available only where registration was obtained by fraud, where the party ceases to have allegiance to the Constitution, or where it is declared unlawful by the government.
    6. Delisting is not removal from the register: The Commission periodically publishes a list of delisted RUPPs, and its notification of October 2025 carried over 800 such parties.
    7. A minimal contest keeps a party active: The six Gujarat based parties stayed on the active list by fielding a total of 15 candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Eg. They are the Aam Janmat Party, Bharatiya National Janata Dal, Garib Kalyan Party, New India United Party, Satyawadi Rakshak Party and Swatantrata Abhivyakti Party.

    What does the compliance record show?

    1. Most annual reports never reach the public: A July 2025 report of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), analysing annual reports for 2022 to 2023, found reports of only 26% of RUPPs available in the public domain.
    2. What weak compliance enables: Poor compliance with statutory requirements together with low transparency lets these parties serve as an opaque channel for tax evasion and money laundering.
    3. The scale problem: A register of thousands of entities, most of which never contest, cannot be policed through annual return scrutiny alone.

    What reforms have been proposed?

    1. The Law Commission’s recommendation: The 255th report of the Law Commission recommended amendments allowing removal from the register of a party that fails to contest elections for ten consecutive years.
    2. The Election Commission’s own proposal: Its memorandum on electoral reforms of 2016 sought an amendment to the RP Act empowering it to deregister a party.
    3. Enforcement rather than registration alone: Transaction level monitoring by the Income Tax Department and other enforcement agencies is feasible with digital records and would act as a deterrent against misuse of exemptions.
    4. Linking exemption to electoral success: The Election Commission has suggested that tax exemption be confined to parties that win seats in the Lok Sabha or a Legislative Assembly.
    5. Why that proposal is contested: Confining exemption to winners is open to the objection that it is undemocratic and extreme, since parties contest consistently without electoral success.
    6. A vote share threshold instead: A vote percentage threshold fixed by law could govern eligibility for tax exemption, on the model of the 1% vote threshold already used for allotting common symbols to RUPPs.

    Challenges to regulating Registered Unrecognised Political Parties

    1. Entry is easy and exit is absent: The statute sets a documentary threshold for entry and provides almost no route out, so the register only grows. Eg. The number of registered parties has risen steadily across successive general elections.
      The Fix: Provide for statutory lapse of registration where a party files no return and contests no election within a fixed period.
    2. Token candidature defeats a contest based test: A party that fields a handful of candidates satisfies any rule keyed to mere participation while doing nothing else. Eg. A large share of candidates in a general election forfeit their security deposit for polling below one sixth of valid votes.
      The Fix: Key the test to a minimum vote share rather than to the act of contesting.
    3. Tax exemption is the actual prize: Exemption on donations makes registration valuable to entities with no electoral purpose at all. Eg. Tax investigations into registered unrecognised parties have found arrangements in which most of a donation was returned to the donor in cash against a commission.
      The Fix: Make exemption conditional on an audited annual return filed on time, rather than automatic on registration.
    4. Disclosure thresholds leave most money invisible: Only contributions above the reporting threshold must be itemised, so funds can be split into smaller amounts. Eg. Parties routinely report large sums under the head of voluntary contributions from unnamed donors.
      The Fix: Require itemised reporting of every contribution above the cash limit, aligning the disclosure threshold with the banking channel threshold.
    5. Enforcement is split across agencies with different mandates: The Election Commission holds the register and the Income Tax Department holds the financial trail, and neither can act on the other’s finding. Eg. Delisting by the Commission does not by itself withdraw an exemption already claimed.
      The Fix: Provide for automatic reference from the Commission to the tax authority on default, with a statutory timeline for action.

    Conclusion

    Regulation here has been treated as a records problem when it is a design problem. The register was built to be easy to enter, because a democracy should not gate the formation of parties, and nothing was built to remove an entity that stops behaving like one. Every measure repeatedly proposed shifts the test from whether a party exists on paper to whether it seeks votes. Whether Parliament is willing to give the Election Commission that power, having left the position untouched since the Court described the gap, is what decides the outcome.

    Back2Basics: Recognition of political parties in India

    1. Who decides: The Election Commission recognises a party as a State party or a national party under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968.
    2. State party test: Recognition in a State requires a fixed share of valid votes together with seats in the Assembly or the Lok Sabha from that State, or a minimum number of Lok Sabha seats from it.
    3. National party test: Recognition as a national party requires recognition as a State party in at least four States, or a fixed vote share along with Lok Sabha seats from several States.
    4. What recognition brings: A recognised party gets a reserved symbol, free broadcast time on public service media, a larger number of star campaigners and copies of the electoral roll.

    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.”