Overview
- The Supreme Court validated the ECI’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) on May 27, giving the commission legal authority to expand door‑to‑door enumeration and mapping against earlier (2002) rolls to identify duplicates, deceased and migrated voters.
- The ECI is operationalising SIR with preparatory mapping in early June and planned house‑to‑house enumeration in many states from late June through July, followed by draft roll publication in late July or early August and final rolls targeted around early October.
- Field officials report uneven readiness: districts such as Mysuru and Ballari report over 96% mapping while Bengaluru and parts of Telangana report roughly 70% or lower, a gap that officials say will drive large numbers into the deletion or verification pipeline.
- Administrators and civil society warn of major rights risks: Telangana officials estimate about 30 lakh voters may be omitted, West Bengal still faces a backlog of roughly 25 lakh appeals from earlier deletions, and displaced people in Manipur — some 59,000 Kuki‑Zo IDPs cited by local bodies — fear exclusion without special procedures.
- The ECI says it will use measures for displaced voters such as camp‑level enumeration, waiving house photographs and accepting any one of 12 standard identity documents, but critics say the process will still place heavy documentary and appeals burdens on poor and marginalised citizens and could affect electoral legitimacy.