Bihar Voter Roll Clean-Up Not One-Off Exercise

While the Election Commission of India (ECI) is executing a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar ahead of the 2025 Assembly elections—marking the first such full-state revision in 22 years—the ECI has, in the recent past, carried out similar exercises to clean and verify the electoral rolls.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

The ECI, as past records show, has deployed mechanisms for corrective voter list clean-ups. These operations—though not formally labelled as SIR—effectively served the same purpose: identifying and correcting anomalies in the electoral rolls.

As per data, the last time such a full-scale SIR was conducted in India was in 2003, also in Bihar. However, since then, the Commission has not invoked SIR at the statewide level but has repeatedly relied on Special Summary Revisions (SSRs) and targeted verification drives in select districts, constituencies, and regions to address complaints of inflated rolls, fake voters, migration, or poor voter turnout.

Though the term "Special Intensive Revision" has remained mostly dormant in official circulars since 2003, the spirit of intensive scrutiny has never disappeared.

Unlike most Special Summary Revisions, which are often limited to targeted areas or sample verifications, the SIR mandates door-to-door verification of every elector across the state.

In Jammu and Kashmir during 2022 and 2023, following the abrogation of Article 370 and the delimitation of constituencies, the ECI conducted a large-scale voter list exercise as part of a Special Summary Revision. This included the addition of new voters, removal of duplicates, and the registration of displaced populations.

Similarly, in West Bengal between 2016 and 2018, after allegations of bogus voting in municipal elections, the Commission ordered house-to-house verification in districts such as Birbhum, Murshidabad, and North 24 Parganas.

Tamil Nadu saw a similar effort in 2015 and 2016 in cities like Chennai and Madurai, where physical verification and photograph comparisons were conducted.