New Delhi: Ramping up its preparations for special intensive revision of voter lists across India, the Election Commission top brass on Wednesday assessed the progress made on mapping the current electors with the voters as per the last SIR in different states.
The exercise will help state poll machinery find out the number of electors who were in the electoral roll after the last intensive revision and continue to be in the latest voter list.
As was the case in Bihar, the voters will not have to submit any documents but only semi-filled enumeration forms.
At the same time, it will not hold the electoral roll cleanup exercise in states where local body elections are taking place or are due, as the grassroots poll machinery is busy with it and may not be able to focus on SIR, officials said Assembly elections in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal are due in 2026.
Besides these five states, SIR could be held in a few other states in the first phase.
A voter list cleanup exercise has concluded in Bihar, where the final list with nearly 7.42 crore names was published on September 30.
The CEC had earlier this month said work is in progress to launch the SIR of electoral rolls in all states, and a final decision on its rollout will be taken by the Election Commission.
Responding to a question at a press conference to announce the Bihar assembly polls, the CEC had said the EC had announced its plan for a pan-India SIR while rolling out the Bihar SIR on June 24.
The work is on, and the three commissioners will meet to decide on dates for the states to launch their SIRs, he said.
According to officials, the EC last month asked the state chief electoral officers (CEOs) at a conference here to be ready for SIR rollout in the next 10 to 15 days. But for the sake of greater clarity, a September 30 deadline was set for the comprehensive cleanup exercise.
The CEOs have been told to keep ready the electoral rolls of their states published after the last SIR.
Several CEOs have already put the voter list published after their last SIR on their websites.
The website of the Delhi CEO has the voter list from 2008, when the last intensive revision took place in the national capital.
In Uttarakhand, the last SIR took place in 2006, and that year’s electoral roll is now on the state CEO website.
The last SIR in states will serve as the cut-off date, just as the 2003 voter list of Bihar was used by the EC for intensive revision.
Most states had the last SIR of the voter list between 2002 and 2004.
Most of the states have nearly completed mapping of current electors with the voters according to the last SIR in the state or Union Territory (UT).
The primary aim of the SIR is to weed out foreign illegal migrants by checking their place of birth.
The move assumes significance in the wake of a crackdown in several states on illegal foreign migrants, mainly from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
