Draft rolls for 3 states, 1 UT released after SIR

Over 7% of names were deleted in MP, nearly 9% in Kerala, 13% in C’garh and 21% in Andaman

- Abhishek Jha, Vrinda Tulsian and Shruti Tomar

Three states and a Union territory on Tuesday published their draft electoral rolls after the first phase of the special intensive revision with Andaman and Nicobar Islands recording the highest percentage of potential deletions of names at nearly 21% and Madhya Pradesh registering the lowest percentage at 7.4%.

Of the 12 states and Union Territories where the controversial exercise began last month, 11 have already published their draft rolls. Only Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state where the draft rolls will be published on New Year's Eve, remains.

Andaman and Nicobar saw its roll contract the most. Of the 310,404 on the rolls in the UT as on October 27, 64,014 names (20.6%) were removed. This is also the highest percentage of deletions for any of the 12 states and UTs.

Chhattisgarh, Kerala, and Madhya Pradesh saw their electoral rolls shrink by 12.9%, 8.6%, and 7.4%. In absolute terms, 2.73 million, 2.41 million, and 4.27 million of the 21.23 million, 27.85 million, and 57.41 million electors in these states were removed from the rolls.

In all, for this round of the SIR that spanned 510 million people across 12 states and Union Territories, around 66 million names might be dropped from the rolls.

This is 13% of the 510 million people, a proportion higher than the 8% deletions seen in the SIR exercise in Bihar in July, the first state to undergo an SIR in the country since the eighth round conducted between 2002 and 2004.

The final rolls will be published in February next year. Kerala goes to the polls next summer. Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh go to the polls in the winter of 2028.