Uploaded Bihar draft rolls format under lens

The Election Commission of India (ECI) appeared to have altered the format of at least some parts of the draft electoral roll for Bihar available on its website, replacing a machine-readable version with scanned image files.

- Vrinda Tulsian

The change came to light on Saturday, nine days after it was first published on August 1 following the conclusion of the first phase of the controversial special intensive revision in Bihar last month.

When the draft rolls were uploaded on August 1, the files were searchable, text-based PDFs of around 1 MB each (of a single booth in assembly constituency) with an apparently higher resolution. The version currently on ECI's website consists of scanned images that cannot be searched via text, are about 7 MB each, and appear to have lower resolution.

The new format of scanned files generally requires optical character recognition (OCR), which is a more tedious and error-prone way of extracting the text from a PDF file.