Amid anti-SIR protests, ECI orders annual SSR to enrol voters in 14 States, 3 UTs

The SSR will be conducted in 14 States and 3 UTs. File. | Photo Credit: Reuters Amid protests against the special intensive revision (SIR) and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday (October 15, 2026) announced the special summary revision (SSR) of electoral rolls in 17 States and Union Territories, including poll-bound Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. The SSR seeks to enrol new voters and update electoral rolls. Also Read : ASDD bulk deletions effected by ECI without due procedure through autogenerated Form-7s signed by EROsSSR, an annual exercise, was stalled last year due to the launch of the now-controversial SIR. Election Commissioners S. S. Sandhu and Vivek Joshi are understood to have raised this as an anomaly among other issues.Unlike the SIR, applicants do not have to submit documents to prove citizenship or be mapped with earlier electoral rolls when enrolling through the SSR.Following protests against the 13 crore SIR deletions, the ECI announced on September 29 a special drive to re-enlist voters who were left out. This re-enrolment through special camps and house-to-house visits by booth-level officers (BLOs) is being done using the original Form 6, without the declaration appended during the SIR. The Commission has also capped the number of Form 7s, used for voter deletions, that an individual can submit amid reports of such applications being filed in bulk.Among the firsts in this year’s SSR, the ECI said that it will provide a “readable PDF” of the alphabetically arranged electoral rolls to contesting candidates and recognised political parties during elections. Opposition parties have been demanding machine-readable electoral rolls rather than image-based PDFs so that they are digitally searchable, indexable, and verifiable.Political parties will get supplementary voter lists that were earlier kept only for record and future use.The SSR process will not include house-to-house visits by BLOs. Instead, draft and final lists will be put up at polling booths.In its order to the Chief Electoral Officers of the States and Union Territories where the exercise will begin, the Commission said that through the SSR it aims to “facilitate the enrolment of eligible electors with reference to the qualifying date of January 1, 2027 along with seeking advance applications for the three subsequent qualifying dates of April 1, July 1 and October 1, 2027.”The ECI directive said that the SSR will be held in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and West Bengal.In States/UTs where the SIR is going on or has just been completed, the SSR schedule will be announced later. These are Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, NCT of Delhi, Odisha, Sikkim, Tripura, and Telangana. For Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh, where SIR has not been done, the schedule for roll revision will be announced after considering the weather conditions. Published - October 15, 2026 07:12 pm IST