Flawed by design, exclusionary in impact

For more than 75 years, the defining preoccupation of the Election Commission of India (ECI) has been “inclusion”. The first general election of 1951-52 had to enrol an electorate of around 17 crore from scratch, many of whom were illiterate. Successive Commissioners treated universal adult franchise as a promise to be fulfilled rather than just a principle to be stated on paper. India could genuinely be proud of being an electoral democracy where voter turnout among the poor is higher than that among the rich, unlike in many western democracies.

Editorial | Obstacle race: On Special Intensive Revision exercise

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls launched by the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) of India, Gyanesh Kumar, has reversed this progressive direction. It was termed an exercise to “purify” the electoral rolls, but in practice, it is riddled with methodological flaws and ad hoc rule changes, resulting in the deletion of a large number of genuine voters.

The names of 13.37 crore people were struck off during the draft stage across 30 States and Union Territories in the three phases of the SIR. The figure includes 65 lakh in Bihar, 6.57 crore in the 12 States and Union Territories covered in Phase 2, and 6.15 crore in Phase 3, whose final rolls are yet to be published. The deletion rate doubled as SIR progressed — from 8.3% in Bihar to 12.9% in Phase 2 and 17% in Phase 3 (it was 32.8% in Delhi and 21.7% in Telangana). In Phases 1 and 2, even after names were added back, net deletions were about 6.2 crore.

In Delhi, the draft roll has only 97.54 lakh electors, barely above the 94.95 lakh who voted in the February 2025 Assembly election. In 24 of Delhi’s 70 constituencies, the draft roll now has fewer electors than the number who voted in the election. The ECI has in effect conceded the point about disenfranchisement. It has now directed officials to run a “special drive” to enrol anyone “whose name has got left out” — an implicit admission that its rolls are missing eligible voters.

Flaws by design

First, enumeration. The ECI’s Manual on Electoral Rolls (2023) describes an intensive revision as a “denovo process without reference to the earlier existing roll” (paragraph 9.3.1); enumerators visit every house and record the particulars of each eligible resident. If a particular elector’s citizenship is in doubt, the Manual requires officials to give “probative value” (paragraph 7.4.2) to their presence on the preceding roll, and places the onus on the objector and not the elector.

The SIR inverts this procedure. It shifts enumeration on to electors and presumes that they are ineligible until they can trace themselves or a parent to the last intensive revision conducted more than two decades ago, or produce documents to establish their eligibility in what resembles a citizenship test.

Electors who could not be found, did not receive or return the form, or were unable to fill it — due to illiteracy, for example — were dropped from the draft roll, even if they had voted in the last election. All this was done at breakneck speed, on the eve of elections in several States.