The Special Intensive Revision of India's electoral rolls

What SIR is

A Special Intensive Revision is a full, house-to-house re-enumeration of an electoral roll: enumerators distribute pre-filled forms, electors verify or correct their entries, and names are checked against an earlier “intensive” roll. It is a much heavier exercise than the routine Special Summary Revision, which merely updates the standing roll without door-to-door verification. The Election Commission’s stated aim is to strip out entries that are deceased, shifted, duplicated or otherwise ineligible, and to detect non-citizens. The contested part is the mechanism: SIR shifts the onus of proof of eligibility onto the voter, who must produce documents to stay on the roll — which critics argue risks removing eligible citizens who cannot.

Where it stands: one year in

SIR passed its first year in June 2026, and the scale is now the story. Wire copy carried by The Hindu put the number of names deleted across the exercise at nearly 6 crore (PTI, 27 June 2026). That figure warrants care, and this brief does not put it in the Commission’s mouth: the ECI publishes per-phase numbers, not a running national total, and “nearly 6 crore” reads as a cross-phase aggregation by the wire rather than an ECI statement. The one phase-level figure that corroborates the order of magnitude is Phase II, where The Hindu reported the consolidated roll of 9 states and 3 UTs was trimmed by 10.2% (12 April 2026) — roughly 5.2 crore, which with Bihar brings the total into that range.

The Bihar exercise that began it (ordered 24 June 2025, the first intensive revision there since 2003, with the 2003 roll as the reference base) is now the archive rather than the news. Two figures circulate for it and we flag rather than reconcile them: the final roll of 30 September 2025 was widely reported as removing roughly 47 lakh names against a 7.9 crore roll, while the PTI copy above puts the Bihar pruning at nearly 65 lakh — a gap that most likely reflects draft-stage versus final accounting, but which we have not been able to pin to an ECI document.

The Supreme Court

The revision was challenged in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India, with co-petitioners including PUCL and several opposition figures. The Court declined to stay SIR, calling roll revision a constitutional mandate, but it constrained how the Commission ran it: it directed the ECI to consider Aadhaar, the voter-ID (EPIC) and ration cards where its document list was non-exhaustive, and ordered publication of booth-level lists of deleted electors with reasons. The Commission ultimately accepted Aadhaar and EPIC as proof of identity, not of citizenship. On 27 May 2026 the Court upheld the Bihar SIR, holding it consistent with the Representation of the People Act and not disproportionate — the case record is tracked by the Supreme Court Observer.

Going nationwide: Phase II and Phase III

With Bihar upheld, the Commission extended SIR across the country in two waves. Phase II (announced late October 2025) covered 9 states and 3 Union Territories — including West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala — with final rolls in early February 2026. Phase III, announced on 14 May 2026, added a further 16 states and 3 UTs — among them Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, Punjab, Manipur and Mizoram. (Reporting in the days before the announcement said Phase III would cover 22 states and UTs; the Commission’s own notification of 14 May puts it at 19, and that is the figure this brief uses.) Enumeration under Phase III began on 31 May 2026 in Odisha, Mizoram, Sikkim and Manipur, so the rollout is staggered rather than simultaneous. The drive is now effectively national, and much of the current friction is at the state level as draft rolls appear:

• Odisha — the draft roll deleted over 20 lakh electors, leaving about 3.13 crore; the opposition flags exclusions over “minor anomalies”.
• Mizoram — first to reach 100% digitisation of forms; its draft roll removed 46,163 names and the state CEO said no foreign nationals were found.
• Manipur — over 19.34 lakh enumeration forms (about 92%) collected, with a final roll due 6 September 2026.
• Karnataka — the sharpest partisan fight, with the BJP and Congress each accusing the other of interfering in how the revision is run.

The first elections fought on revised rolls

The 2026 assembly elections were the first real test of the revised rolls, and they are now behind us: Assam, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala and Puducherry voted in April 2026 and results were declared on 4 May 2026. On the reported outcomes, the BJP took Assam and West Bengal (208 of 294 seats there), the Congress-led UDF took Kerala, the AINRC-led NDA retained Puducherry, and in Tamil Nadu the TVK emerged largest (108 of 234) with no alliance reaching the majority mark, forming a government after a floor test in mid-May.

We record those outcomes at reference tier: they are consistently reported and not seriously contested, but we have not been able to read them off the Commission’s own results portal, and this brief does not upgrade a fact’s provenance for convenience. What matters for this topic is narrower and undisputed: the polls were conducted on rolls produced by Phase II of the revision, which makes the accuracy dispute retrospective as well as prospective — arguments about deletions are now arguments about elections already held.

The dispute, in two positions

The contest is now an accountability dispute over the referee itself:

• The opposition. On 30 June 2026, 23 opposition parties and an Independent MP wrote jointly to the Chief Justice of India, alleging partisanship and seeking relief. A former Election Commissioner, Ashok Lavasa, has separately argued the Bihar exercise was discriminatory and should have been paused, warning that putting the burden of proving eligibility on the voter risks mass exclusion.
• The Commission. The Chief Election Commissioner has defended SIR as making the rolls more accurate, called clean rolls a constitutional obligation, and described India’s electoral system as among the most credible in the world — rejecting the “vote theft” framing outright.

The framing of this dispute was, for its first year, almost entirely domestic — an internal contest over electoral integrity between the government-appointed Commission and the opposition. That is the one thing about this brief that has changed structurally since July: it has begun to internationalise.

The dispute leaves the country

Three United Nations special rapporteurs — on minority issues, on freedom of opinion and expression, and on freedom of religion or belief — sent the Indian government a joint communication dated 1 May 2026 questioning the revision, as reported by SabrangIndia on 13 July 2026. On that account the mandate-holders raise the targeting of Bengali and Muslim electors, particularly in West Bengal, flag automated deletion, and ask what steps ensured eligible voters were not prevented from voting in the 2026 polls. The communication cites 52 million removals — the Phase II figure, not the larger cross-phase number.

Two honest limits on this section. We could not retrieve the communication’s official OHCHR reference, so the account rests on a single advocacy-outlet report rather than the primary document, and it is tiered accordingly. And we found no ECI or government response on the record — which is not the same as saying none was made; the Commission’s own press listing for early July carries nothing on either the deletion totals or the communication, and we could not search beyond it. Both gaps are on our list to close, not reasons to skip the development: an international human-rights channel opening on an Indian electoral process is a change in kind, not degree.

Who owns this topic (and why we’re here)

Searches for “SIR electoral rolls” today surface the primary layer — the ECI site, PIB, state Chief Electoral Officer portals — and encyclopaedic mirrors, but no maintained explainer that ties the whole thread together with its provenance intact. That is the gap this brief fills: a single sourced, compacted state-of-play across the Bihar origin, the Supreme Court record, the nationwide rollout and the live dispute, anchored to a structured Election Commission dossier.

Maintained topic brief. Analysis by IndiaStand — it characterises the state of play and attributes each claim; it makes no forecast and offers no recommendation.