Supreme Court will hear Delhi SIR deletions after 47.5 lakh names drop off the draft roll

The Supreme Court on 17 September agreed to hear, on 21 September, a petition against the deletion of names from Delhi’s draft electoral roll under the Special Intensive Revision. Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri, told a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant that 47 lakh electors were left off the draft published on 31 August and that notices have gone to another 33 lakh people still on the list.

The draft roll records 97.53 lakh electors who submitted enumeration forms. A further 47.56 lakh names were kept off under the Absent, Shifted, Dead or Duplicate heading. Of the people who remain on the draft, 13.79 lakh have been marked “no mapping” and 19.33 lakh have been marked “logical discrepancies.” Those two buckets add up to about 33.13 lakh notices.

The petitioners asked the court to stop deletions that rest on notices which do not set out the facts against the elector. They said the phrase “logical discrepancies” is not defined and that a 14 May Election Commission communication did not fix the tests for putting someone in that class.

The claims window is almost closed

Claims and objections run from 31 August to 30 September. By 15 September only 62,583 Form-6 applications had been filed to put names back on. The Delhi election office has internally estimated that about 10 percent of the deleted names, or 4.75 lakh people, might apply. The first 15 days produced about 13 percent of that estimate. New Delhi district filed the fewest applications, 1,203.

Another 2.12 lakh Form-6 applications had already been filed in Delhi before the draft came out. The pace after publication has been slower than the pace before it. If that rate holds, most of the 47.5 lakh names will still be off the roll when the window shuts.

What the audit adds

An audit by the Sabar Institute and Voter Adhikar Manch, using Election Commission and Delhi CEO data, put 47,27,762 electors in the ASDD class. That was about 32.8 percent of the roll as it stood when the revision began. Inside that number the audit counted 31,59,223 people as permanently shifted, 11,73,552 as untraceable or absent, 2,82,412 as dead and 1,41,535 as enrolled elsewhere or duplicate.

Frontline reported a separate problem from eight booths in Mangolpuri. About 1,800 names from the 2025 roll appeared on neither the new draft nor the ASDD list. Of 1,326 of those names checked against the 2025 roll, all 1,326 had been registered. That is a small sample, eight booths out of 14,947. It is large enough to raise a third category: people who did not even enter the revision machinery.

There is also an 11-lakh gap before SIR started. District rolls on 17 January 2025 showed about 1.56 crore electors. When the revision began the Commission put Delhi at 1.45 crore. Those 11 lakh names are not part of the 47.5 lakh ASDD figure. They went missing earlier.

What the court can still do

The listing on 21 September falls nine days before claims close. If the bench wants names restored, or notices redrafted with reasons, it has to move inside that window. After 30 September the draft hardens toward a final roll and the remedy shifts from an administrative correction to an appeal against a published list.

Delhi votes on a cycle that makes the roll a political object as well as an administrative one. SIR is presented as a hygiene exercise: remove the dead, the moved and the doubled. At this scale, a third of the starting list, hygiene and disenfranchisement become hard to tell apart without booth-level reasons. That is what the petitioners say the notices do not contain. Monday’s hearing is the first chance the court has given itself to test that claim before the window shuts.