More than 1.5 crore names off poll rolls in latest phase of SIR
The Election Commission is midway through the third round of its special intensive revision of electoral rolls, and the scale of the pruning is now visible. Across the twelve States and Union Territories where draft rolls have been published, 1.58 crore names have gone — 11.51% of the 13.77 crore voters who were on those rolls before the exercise began.
The removals are far from uniform. Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu lost the largest share at 29.64%, followed by Arunachal Pradesh at 19.09% and Haryana at 16.38%. Mizoram sits at the other end at 5.2%. In raw numbers Andhra Pradesh leads: 44.89 lakh names struck off, shrinking its roll from 4.16 crore to 3.71 crore.
Andhra Pradesh also shows what those categories actually mean. Of its deletions, 22.30 lakh had shifted or were not found at the address, 15.22 lakh were reported dead, and 7.37 lakh were enrolled in more than one place.
None of it is final. A claims-and-objections window follows every draft, so names can be restored or newly added before the roll is notified. Seven more States and Union Territories, including Delhi, Punjab, Karnataka and Maharashtra, are still doing door-to-door verification.
For the exam the useful thing is not the arithmetic but the tension underneath it: an accurate roll and an inclusive roll are both constitutional goods, and an exercise on this scale sets them against each other.
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