SIR draft rolls cut 6.15 crore names as 17 states shrink 15.7 percent since 2024

Draft electoral rolls published in the third phase of the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision show 6.15 crore names removed across 17 states and Union territories. The Hindu, working from the drafts, put the combined electorate at 29,93,00,115, down 15.7 percent from 35,50,50,008 at the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Between that election and the SIR enumeration cut-off the same states had added about 57.75 lakh voters, taking the pre-draft total to 36,08,07,394. The draft then deleted 6.15 crore names. Maharashtra recorded the largest fall in raw numbers, 1,58,96,198 electors, or 17.08 percent. Delhi fell 35.89 percent. Chandigarh fell 31.84 percent.

An earlier Hindu count of the same phase, published when Delhi and Maharashtra drafts appeared on 31 August, put deletions at 17.04 percent of the 36.08 crore names on the pre-SIR rolls. That piece said Delhi's deletions ran at 32.78 percent on the then-available figures, with 47,56,722 names removed after enumeration forms were collected from 67.22 percent of the previous roll. Maharashtra's draft stood at 7,71,65,562 against 9,78,54,049 on the previous roll.

The states and territories in phase three include Delhi, Odisha, Mizoram, Sikkim, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh, Telangana, Punjab, Karnataka, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Nagaland, Tripura, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. Drafts for Nagaland and Tripura were still due, on 20 September and 21 October. Final rolls were scheduled to begin appearing on 6 September, with Mizoram, Sikkim and Manipur first.

The Commission describes SIR as a house-to-house check against absent, shifted and dead electors. Opposition parties have treated the scale of deletions as a political fact. In Delhi, Jan Sarokar, Voter Adhikar Manch, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and the National Federation of Indian Women held a hearing where residents arrived in the rain with papers, including enumeration forms they said had never been collected. CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya called for a single INDIA bloc line on SIR rather than state-by-state positions.

Claims and objections can still put names back. In earlier SIR phases, final rolls recovered some of the draft cuts. They did not recover all of them. Business Standard, reviewing the first two phases across 13 states and territories, put the net reduction after the final rolls at about 5.84 crore electors.

The next numbers that matter are the finals that start this weekend. If Delhi's 35.89 percent draft cut shrinks only modestly after claims, the capital will go into the next election cycle with a roll that looks unlike the one used in 2024. Maharashtra's 1.59 crore draft gap is large enough to rearrange local arithmetic even after a partial restoration. The Commission will say the dead and the departed have been taken off. The parties that have to fight on the new lists will count who is missing in each booth.