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It has now been more than eight months since the Election Commission of India (ECI) initiated the Special Intensive Review (SIR) process to reform electoral rolls in India. The practice began in Bihar and has now been carried out in nine states and three union territories, representing 237 of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies in India. This figure does not include the 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in Assam, where the process of reviewing lists is called Special Review (SR) rather than SIR, and where the process differs significantly from that of SIR. ECI has already announced that it will begin this process in the remaining parts of the country from April.
February 28 marked an important milestone in this journey as the Independent Electoral Commission released the final electoral roll for West Bengal, with six million voters in the rolls still under scrutiny. The list was released after a Supreme Court order, which may have tried to pre-empt the disruptive effect that constant scrutiny would have had on the timely conduct of elections in the state, as a new assembly would have to be formed before May 7. The West Bengal problem is not the only problem associated with the ongoing SIR process. In fact, Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, is still trying to finalize the process and ECI has set a revised deadline for the state of April 10.
All of this makes it a good opportunity to ask what do we know about the SIR exercise so far? Here are five major trends that can be flagged.
This process is the longest in Uttar Pradesh and was the shortest in Bihar
Bihar, where the SIR began on June 24 and ended with the publication of the final list on September 30 last year, completed the process the fastest: in just 98 days. On the other hand, with an expected completion date of April 10, the exercise is expected to last 157 days in Uttar Pradesh, the longest among all. To be sure, this exercise has not yet been completed in West Bengal either, where the process was already taking 116 days on February 28. Moreover, voters who were not appointed to the 2002 SIR list or had logical discrepancies were not called for hearings in the SIR exercise conducted in Bihar, a process which only began with SIR across 12 states/union territories beginning on November 4. However, this extended the timeline by only about 10 days for the most part. Countries.
The process witnessed a decrease in the number of voters in all states…
This is the most important thing I learned from the exercise. If we compare the final number of voters after completion of the SIR exercise with what it was before it started, there was a decline in every state and UT that witnessed SIR. The SR exercise in Assam also saw a modest deletion of 0.97% of voters compared to the pre-SR list. On a cumulative basis, the SIR exercise resulted in a net deletion of 35.4 million or 8.1% of India’s voters in the 12 states and union territories where the exercise was completed. To be sure, this number only relates to changes in the SIR process. For example, Bihar added half a million voters to its rolls between the completion of the SIR exercise on September 30 and the 2025 elections, and they are not included in these calculations. Moreover, the numbers will change dramatically once West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh complete this exercise. As expected, the extent of deletions at the state level shows significant variation.
But the numbers almost always increased between the “draft” and “final” rosters.
SIR is best understood as a three-step process. The first step is to freeze the state’s electoral rolls (which are in the process of being constantly updated). The second step is the counting exercise, where voters on the lists upon notification of the exercise are supposed to fill out counting forms to indicate their presence and fulfillment of the documentary criteria. Once this process is completed, a “Draft List” is published which includes everyone submitting their count form, with a set deadline for publication of the final list which will correct errors/omissions in the draft list as well as add new additions. In almost all states, the number of voters decreased between the SIR checklist and the draft list, and then increased in the final list. Of course, there are big differences between states here as well. West Bengal became the first state to put a large number (six million) of voters under scrutiny even after publishing its final lists. It is also the only state except Goa, where the number of voters declined between the draft and the final list. To be sure, the SR exercise in Assam only omitted voters in the final list and there was no physical verification of documents in the state. Only people to be deleted are marked in the draft list.
If Bihar is any indication, a lower voter turnout does not necessarily mean a lower voter turnout
This is the most important thing we should take into consideration. Bihar saw 6% or 4.8 million deletions in its electoral rolls before and after SIR. However, this did not lead to a decline in the number of voters between the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the 2025 Assembly elections, something we noted in our first analysis of post-SIR data in Bihar on November 7. What happened in the 2025 elections in Bihar was a significant increase in voter turnout. This essentially suggests that a lot of the deletions as part of the SIR exercise in Bihar were for voters who had died, moved (more on this later) or were registered in two places but not necessarily voting in both. This trend is likely to continue in other states as well. This is precisely why it is difficult to draw a one-to-one correspondence between SIR and voter suppression. Certainly, the fact that as many as six million voters ended up under scrutiny in West Bengal has only fueled these fears.
How important is migration when it comes to SIR deletion?
An HT analysis published on January 8 found that areas with the highest share of deletions between the pre-SIR draft list and the post-SIR draft list were also those with a high share of voter growth between the 2011-2013 election cycle and the pre-SIR draft list. In most cases, these areas were the most urban areas of the state. HT proposed a theory to explain this pattern: people migrate to more urban areas, obtain their voter ID cards there but do not necessarily leave them in their original homes and likely chose the latter when forced to choose by the SIR. This certainly does not mean that immigration is the only reason for deletions. For example, the link shown above does not apply to the summary review exercise in Assam. Moreover, for immigration to be the sole cause of deletion, the prior growth rate of voters would be strongly related to the deletion rate in the SIR, which is not necessarily the case. Additionally, it is not possible to say whether this trend will continue in West Bengal, where the placement of more than 8% of voters in the final list is yet to be seen. And without a It is also not possible to say yet whether the trend continues everywhere. Only six states — Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — published a summary of district-level deletions at the draft stage. Among these districts, Rajasthan has not released the details of the final district-level list.
Roshan Kishore is data and political economy editor at Hindustan Times. His weekly HT Featured Trading Terms column appears every Friday.
