SIR applies a decade of exclusion lessons perfected on welfare schemes

The Special Intensive Revision of India’s voter rolls has sparked concerns about the widespread disenfranchisement of eligible voters and that it is becoming a citizenship test. Its method is not new, but what is different this time is that it threatens the right to vote.

Digital tools have served the rolls since the 1990s: voter identity cards from 1993, computerised rolls, voting machines in every constituency by the 2004 general election and photo rolls nationwide by 2009. Through those years, rolls were corrected one application at a time, with officers deciding each case – former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi says they were already about 99% accurate. From 2015 the Commission set out to “purify” the rolls by matching them against Aadhaar records.

The SIR, which began in Bihar in June 2025, completes the turn. It denies the roll on which the 2024 general election was held any presumption of eligibility, and presumes eligible only those found on a roll two decades old, so that everyone under about 40 can be linked only through a parent or grandparent or by producing supporting documents.

On September 23, The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected on record 14 times in 10 months to steps taken...

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