Photo: कृष्ण कान्त शर्मा / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Around 20 lakh of the nearly 33 lakh entries flagged during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Delhi’s electoral rolls have now been resolved, the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Delhi, said on Monday, October 12. That leaves roughly 13 lakh cases to be settled before the final voter list is published on December 4.
In a press note, the CEO’s office said it had run a “proactive campaign” to clear the backlog and repeated its assurance that no eligible voter would be left out of the roll. Anyone with a grievance, it said, could approach any of the city’s 14,947 booth-level officers (BLOs), 902 assistant electoral registration officers, 70 electoral registration officers, 13 district election officers or the CEO directly.
Slow start, then a sharp jump
Progress was sluggish at first. In the first 30 days after the draft rolls came out on August 31, only about 4 lakh notices were disposed of, according to the CEO’s figures. In the 12 days that followed, roughly 16 lakh more were cleared, an average of about 1.3 lakh a day.
The resolved cases include both entries that were verified and will go into the final roll and those that were rejected. Disposal of notices and objections can continue until November 30.
Officials credited the faster pace to simpler procedures. At a meeting on September 26, the Election Commission ruled that voters flagged for “logical discrepancies” or for being “unmapped” no longer had to attend hearings at a government office. Instead, BLOs now go from house to house to collect documents, family members can appear on a voter’s behalf, and online hearings have been expanded. Since September 30, officers have been able to clear a notice on the strength of a BLO’s letter confirming the voter’s details. The number of assistant registration officers was also raised from 297 to 902, and each BLO has been asked to dispose of at least 10 cases a day.
Who got notices and why
Delhi had about 1.45 crore electors when the SIR began on June 30. Around 47.5 lakh names were struck off as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, leaving 97.5 lakh voters on the draft roll. Of these, about 33 lakh were sent notices: 19.33 lakh over discrepancies such as mismatched names or ages, and 13.79 lakh because they could not be linked to the 2002 revision. Those who received notices included Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and BJP veteran LK Advani.
What comes next
Special camps were held at all polling station locations on October 11, and the CEO’s office has asked eligible voters who are still not enrolled to visit camps on October 18 and 25. New voters can file Form-6 offline with their BLO or registration officer until October 30, or online through the voters’ portal and the ECINET app.
The figures come as the SIR remains at the centre of a political storm, with opposition parties marching in Delhi and petitioning the Supreme Court against the exercise and the Chief Election Commissioner.
