EC to take call on pan-India SIR rollout soon; like to be held before year-end

New Delhi, Sep 10 (PTI) The Election Commission will soon decide on the date to roll out special intensive revision on a pan-India basis and the exercise to clean up the voter list across states may take place before the end of the year, officials said Wednesday.

After a day-long meeting of EC's state chief electoral officers here, officials said that with as many as five assembly polls due next year, the all-India SIR could take place in the coming months in 2025.

At the meeting, the CEOs suggested documents for the purpose of ensuring that no eligible citizen is left out of the electoral roll and no ineligible person is included in it.

It was reiterated that these documents should promote ease of submission for the eligible citizens.

This assumes significance as the Supreme Court has directed the EC to accept the Aadhaar card as the 12th document, besides 11 others, as proof of identity of the elector.

The CEOs were told to keep the electoral rolls of their states, published after the last SIR, ready. Some state CEOs have already put the voter list published after their last SIR on their websites.

The Commission has said that after Bihar, SIR will be carried out in the entire country.

Assembly elections in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are due in 2026.

In a statement, the poll authority said a presentation on the strategies, constraints and best practices adopted was made by the CEO of Bihar so that other CEOs can learn from their experiences.

The CEOs gave detailed presentations on the number of electors, the qualifying date of the last SIR and the electoral roll in their state as per the last completed SIR.

The CEOs also presented the status of digitisation and uploading of the Electoral Roll after the previous SIR on the State/UT CEO website.

They also gave the status of mapping of current electors with the electors as per the last SIR in their state or Union Territory.

In order to ensure that there is a uniform implementation of the Commission's initiative to ensure that no polling station has over 1,200 electors, the status of rationalisation of polling stations was also reviewed, it said.

The primary aim of the intensive revision is to weed out foreign illegal migrants by checking their place of birth.

The move assumes significance in the wake of a crackdown in various states on illegal foreign migrants, including from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Eventually, the poll authority will begin SIR in the entire country "for the discharge of its constitutional mandate to protect the integrity of the electoral rolls".

As part of the intense review, poll officials will carry out house-to-house verification to ensure an error-free voters' list.

Amid allegations by opposition parties that the EC has fudged voter data to help the BJP, the poll panel has taken additional steps in the intensive revision to ensure illegal migrants do not get enrolled in the voter list.

An additional 'declaration form' has been introduced for a category of applicants seeking to become electors or shifting from outside the state. They will have to give an undertaking that they were born in India before July 1, 1987 and provide any document establishing the date of birth and/or place of birth.

One of the options listed in the declaration form is that they were born in India between July 1, 1987 and December 2, 2004.

They will also have to submit documents about the date/place of birth of their parents.

The SIR in poll-bound Bihar has come under attack from opposition parties, which questioned the timing of the exercise and claimed that crores of eligible citizens will be denied voting rights for want of documents.

The Supreme Court has asked the EC to ensure that no eligible citizen is left behind.

The website of the Delhi CEO has the 2008 voter list when the last intensive revision took place in the national capital. In Uttarakhand, the last SIR took place in 2006, and that year's electoral roll is now on the state CEO website.

The last SIR in states will serve as the cut-off date, just as the 2003 voter list of Bihar is being used by the EC for intensive revision. Most of the states carried out the revision of electoral rolls between 2002 and 2004. PTI NAB RT RT RT