CHENNAI: The Election Commission of India, in its communication on Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, cited several reasons for cleaning up the rolls, which included rapid urbanisation in the past 20 years and related migrations.
No one has disputed this need or the fact that the electoral rolls were inflated. However, the electors present in the draft SIR rolls in Tamil Nadu suggested that while ECI was keen to trim the roll, it did not pay adequate attention to check what should be the appropriate number of electors in the rolls.
ECI’s Manual on Electoral Rolls (2023) mandates detailed health checks while revising electoral rolls. A key parameter is the elector-population ratio (EPR), to check if the number of electors on the rolls is closely matching the number of eligible voters (population in the 18 or above age group).
The commission has standard reporting formats to ensure checks at least at the district-level and the state-level (Format 3A and Format 3 respectively as per ECI’s reporting formats).
For instance, the detailed instructions issued in August 2024 for the Special Summary Revision of rolls with cut-off date as January 1, 2025 (revision done before SIR), said that “Format 1-8 for statistical analysis of the health of the electoral rolls must be prepared before the draft publication and also at the end of the summary revision before final publication. The DEO must examine the part wise format 1 to 8 to understand the implication of the health of electoral rolls. The CEO should simultaneously start remedial action, if any required”. In the absence of latest Census data, it asked CEOs to rely on population estimates for such checks.
However, multiple officials told TNIE that this was not done before publishing the draft SIR rolls. TNIE’s analysis reveals an alarming deviation in EPR, when compared with reliable population estimates (refer to table). At the state-level (90.3%), it showed every tenth voter has been potentially left out, while in urban areas the numbers are even more worrying. In Chennai (64.8%), the data showed every third voter potentially getting left out.
A senior bureaucrat with vast experience in election-related work in Tamil Nadu, while noting that the estimates are fully reliable, said SIR should have been coupled with the upcoming Census. “BLOs could have tagged along with the Census enumerators”.
M Vijayabaskar, professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, whose research areas include rural-urban interactions, said inter-state migration from rural to urban areas for employment is a “robust phenomenon” in Tamil Nadu.
He said the share of population dependent on agriculture increased during Covid-19 all over India. While this was first thought to be a temporary phenomenon, it has not come down in most states. Tamil Nadu, however, is an exception. It is the only major state, where it is consistently coming down as people find non-farm work in nearby towns or metropolitan agglomerations.
In such a situation, he said one would expect the deletion of entries while cleaning up the rolls to be more pronounced in rural than in urban areas. He said it did not make sense that the deletions were manifold higher in urban areas, adding that the same cannot be attributed to “migrations” in general.
IT Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan argued that it was “beyond the realm of any reasonable person” that this exercise could be done with thousands of part-time employees (BLOs), without training, in such a short span of time. Dr Rajan, who is actively monitoring the exercise in his Madurai Central constituency, said as the deadline approached and BLOs faced enormous pressure to meet targets (during enumeration phase), many caved in and marked voters in bulk as “shifted”. He said ECI should have done comparisons with reliable population estimates, as one cannot operate in the dark. He said that for ECI, while “bias is the cardinal sin, its lack of competence is the original sin”.