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 began: Bihar, 2025

The Commission ordered SIR in Bihar on 24 June 2025 ahead of the state election — the first intensive revision there since 2003, so the 2003 roll was the reference base: electors traceable to it faced a lighter documentary burden. Against a roll of about 7.9 crore electors, the final roll published on 30 September 2025 removed roughly 47 lakh names (~6%). The Commission framed this as purification; the opposition read the scale of deletions, and the citizenship-detection framing, as a route to disenfranchisement.

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. 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 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 is almost entirely domestic: it plays out as an internal contest over electoral integrity between the government-appointed Commission and the opposition, with little of the domestic-vs-foreign divergence that marks India’s geopolitical stories.

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.