CHENNAI: The draft electoral rolls released on Friday as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) showed that the size of Tamil Nadu’s urban electorate shrank notably, with 58 of the 234 (24.7%) Assembly constituencies that are predominantly urban in nature accounting for 45.4% of the total deletions of 97.37 lakh.
Analysis showed that these 58 constituencies, singled out by TNIE for their urban character, accounted for 28.6% of the state’s total electorate of 6.41 crore before the SIR. However, this dropped by three percentage points to 25.6% of the total electorate in the draft SIR rolls, which had a total of 5.44 crore voters. While there will be further changes during the claims and objections phase of the SIR, officials said that the numbers are not likely to change much in terms of percentage.
Among the urban constituencies, the drop was more pronounced in Chennai and its three urbanised neighbouring districts of Kancheepuram, Chengalpattu, and Tiruvallur. The 37 constituencies in these four districts previously accounted for 18.4% of the electorate, which has come down to 16% in the draft rolls.
A total of 43 constituencies saw a drop of over one-fifth of their electorate (20% or more). Of these, 38 were predominantly urban in nature. Of the 26 constituencies that lost one-fourth (25%) or more of their electorate, 25 are completely urban. Official sources TNIE spoke to said that the reasons for more deletions were mainly due to residential areas becoming more commercial and internal migrations.
“We have not received major complaints from anyone that the process was not carried out properly in urban areas. A more detailed study would be needed to comprehend the reasons for such large deletions, particularly in Chennai,” one of the officials involved in the SIR process said.
Another official said while migration of people from core city areas to peripheral areas can be one of the possible reasons, many peri-urban areas also saw significant percentage of deletions. For instance, barring the exception of Poonamallee, the constituencies located near Greater Chennai Corporation saw a drop of over 20%.
Gender characteristic remains unchanged
The composition of male, female and third-gender voters prior to the SIR and the draft rolls showed that the proportion of male to female remained the same in the ratio of 51% being women and 49% being men.
This indicated that the deletions were not more among one gender, unlike the draft roll phase of Bihar, which saw more women voters getting deleted than men. Of the total deletions, 45.1 lakh were men and 47.2 lakh were women. The number of third-gender voters, however, saw a sharp drop in the draft roll. The number came down by nearly 2,000 from 9.120 to 7,191.