SIR: Glaring oddities in Maharashtra’s deletion patterns

Voters have one month to submit claims and objections for inclusion or deletion of names in the draft list | Photo Credit: ANI Analyses of constituency-wise deletions and lists of deletions in Maharashtra after the enumeration phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls have revealed several oddities, indicating high chances of aggressive and arbitrary deletions. The draft SIR roll released on August 31, showed that a total of 2.07 crore electors have been dropped from the 288 Assembly Constituencies (ACs) of Maharashtra, which is 21.14% of the 9.79 crore electors whose names were there on the pre-SIR rolls.To place Maharashtra’s deletions in context, the 2.07 crore names dropped is higher than Chhattisgarh’s entire electorate. More surprisingly, it is higher than even the 2.04 crore deletions in Uttar Pradesh, during the SIR; U.P. is India’s largest State with 13.4 crore electors — which is bigger than the number of electors in the draft rolls of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi combined.The Election Commission of India (EC) has desisted from releasing the Elector to Population (EP) ratio for any State during the ongoing SIR process despite its own Manual on Electoral Rolls mandating it to do so during and after every revision. An estimate of EP ratio based on the projected population in the 18-plus age-group as per the report of Government of India’s Technical Group on Population Projections showed that Maharashtra’s draft rolls are short of 1.92 crore electors, which is roughly the same as the number of deletions.As seen in other States, deletions in Maharashtra were also highly concentrated in urban areas. A total of 58 ACs saw at least one-third of names (33%) in the rolls getting deleted, of which 25 ACs saw deletions of 40% or more. Almost all of these were in and around the Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Nashik districts. Bhiwandi East in Thane recorded the highest deletions (49.1%). Of the 3.76 lakh voters, 1.85 lakh names were deleted.“Permanently Shifted” and “Untraceable or Absent” seem to have been used as blanket categories to delete large number of names from the rolls. The table below shows a sample of a few constituencies that saw deletions due to widely different reasons. Kalyan Rural in Thane saw 2.52 lakh deletions, of which 2.39 lakh (96.5%) were marked as shifted or absent — that is 96-97 in every 100 deleted voters had either shifted or were untraceable, as per the EC. But the constituency saw only 4,882 deletions marked as ‘Deceased’.In 85 ACs, shifted and absent accounted for anywhere between 75% to 96.5% of all deletions. These 85 had 3.21 crore electors before SIR, of which 1.17 crore (36.3%) were deleted. Of these 1.17 crore deletions, 97.9 lakh (84%) were marked as shifted or absent.The Hindu had pointed out how the EC’s own manual says that an absentee voter cannot be deleted from the rolls as they continued to be an ordinary resident of the place where they are enrolled. An FAQ published by the Chief Electoral Officer of Maharashtra says ‘Absent’ means “the elector was unavailable”. Analysis indicated that these two reasons were applied arbitrarily and interchangeably in several constituencies.The table below shows the top five districts that saw extreme variations in the per cent of electors deleted for being absent. Pune exemplified this problem. Within the same district and among ACs located nearby, the share of electors marked as shifted or absent widely varied. Maval saw just 322 names (0.4%) marked as Absent while over 77,000 were marked as shifted. Hadapsar, on the other hand, saw 86% of its 2.98 lakh voters marked as absent. Published - September 15, 2026 05:37 pm IST