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When India became independent, its people were granted universal suffrage as a fundamental right, thanks to the visionary leadership of the freedom movement. Under colonial rule, the right to vote was restricted to a privileged few. After independence, this right was expanded to cover the entire adult population.
Before the process of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) began, efforts were made to include every eligible resident of India in the voters’ list. Citizens were encouraged to vote using alternative identity proofs if they did not possess an Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC), provided their names were already on the rolls. It was assumed that foreigners would not vote unless they had lived in India long enough to acquire citizenship. Thus, anyone who considered themselves an Indian citizen had the right to vote—this was the essence of universal suffrage.
With the introduction of SIR, however, this foundational principle has been seriously undermined. Contrary to what its name suggests, SIR is not a mere revision of electoral rolls; it is effectively a fresh enumeration. While its stated purpose is to remove the names of the dead, duplicate voters, and those who have permanently shifted, in practice it has excluded several other categories of genuine voters who would have remained on the rolls under a routine revision.
Consider the case of Uttar Pradesh, which has an adult population of approximately 16.1 crore. The state has recently completed a revision of voters’ lists for the upcoming panchayat elections through a door-to-door survey conducted by Booth Level Officers (BLOs), resulting in a rural voters’ list of 12.7 crore. In contrast, during the SIR conducted across both rural and urban areas of Uttar Pradesh, the Election Commission of India (ECI) required all 15.4 crore voters on the existing rolls to submit enumeration forms. Only 12.6 crore voters were able to do so.
This means that the total number of voters after SIR for the entire state is lower than the number of voters listed for rural panchayat elections alone. How does one explain this anomaly? Clearly, beyond the removal of dead, duplicate, and permanently shifted voters, many other eligible voters were excluded simply because they could not submit enumeration forms.
Some voters attempted to submit their forms online, despite the process being extremely cumbersome. The voter’s mobile number must be linked to both the Aadhaar card and the EPIC, and the name on both documents must match exactly. Moreover, while Aadhaar details are optional when submitting the form manually, the online process does not allow one to proceed without entering Aadhaar information. When voters later check the status of their submitted forms on the ECI website, the link often opens a fresh form instead of displaying confirmation. Those whose forms were submitted through BLOs and subsequently uploaded receive a message stating that the form has already been submitted. A complaint regarding this discrepancy—specifically, cases where successfully submitted online forms failed to show any confirmation—was submitted to the Chief Election Commissioner on December 18, 2025, but no response has been received.
There are also voters who possess valid EPICs but find that when they check their details on the ECI website, it shows “no result found.” This suggests that their names may have been removed, either accidentally or deliberately. Technically, possession of a valid EPIC should guarantee inclusion in the current electoral rolls. The critical question, therefore, is why these voters did not receive enumeration forms. Without receiving the forms, they could not submit them, ensuring that their names will be missing from the draft rolls.
Another category includes voters who do not possess EPICs but whose names—or those of their parents or grandparents—appear in the last SIR list of 2002–03, thereby satisfying the ECI’s citizenship criteria. Since they too did not receive enumeration forms, they were unable to submit them, and their names will also be absent from the draft rolls.
Then there are voters whose names appear on the current voters’ list but who were displaced en masse by government development projects, such as residents of the former Akbar Nagar in Lucknow. In many such cases, BLOs refused to provide enumeration forms, claiming that these voters had permanently shifted to another Vidhan Sabha constituency. The correct procedure should have been to issue enumeration forms and simultaneously facilitate the submission of Form 8 for address change. Instead, these voters were denied the opportunity to submit enumeration forms and will consequently find their names deleted from the draft rolls.
All voters falling into the above categories are now being directed to fill Form 6, which is meant for first-time voters. This form requires an undertaking that the applicant’s name has never appeared on any electoral roll. In effect, genuine voters are being asked to lie in order to regain their right to vote. This raises serious doubts about whether the nearly three crore names eliminated through the SIR process—many of them belonging to legitimate voters—will ever be restored to the electoral rolls. The most affected will inevitably be the vulnerable sections of society: the poor, Dalits, Adivasis, women, and minorities.
It is evident that instead of opting for a simple door-to-door revision—as was done successfully for the panchayat elections—the SIR process, by relying on self-submitted enumeration forms, has excluded nearly 18 percent of voters, many of them genuine. A fundamental question also arises: why were two entirely different methods adopted simultaneously in Uttar Pradesh to revise voters’ lists for two different levels of elections, resulting in two markedly different electoral rolls for the same adult population?
Can there be a more telling example of bureaucratic insolence, inefficiency, and waste of public time and resources—not to mention the toll on the lives of BLOs who became victims of this process? Does this not strike at the very spirit of universal suffrage?
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Arundhati Dhuru is associated with the National Alliance of People’s Movements, and Sandeep Pandey with the Socialist Party (India)
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