दिल्ली में सायर के तहत आधे से अधिक मतदाता सूची से हटाए या संशयित,VIP को तेज़ ट्रैक, गरीबों को कड़े दस्तावेज़ी प्रक्रिया

New Delhi: Delhi may witness one of the largest purges of voters seen anywhere so far under the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s revision of the capital’s voter list.

Under the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Delhi’s voter roll, more than half (54.6 percent) of the capital’s existing voters have either been struck off the voter roll or been served notices by the ECI asking them to prove that they are genuine.

Before the SIR, Delhi had 1.45 crore voters. Of these, the ECI first removed 47.6 lakh electors listed as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate (ASDD). It then sent notices to another 31.6 lakh voters remaining on the draft voter list.

That means, 79.2 lakh out of the 1.45 crore voters have either already been purged or stand to be removed unless they go through a chaotic and difficult process of proving not only their identities but also of their previous generation.

The 31.6 lakh voters, against whom the ECI has raised doubts, now have until October 29 to prove their identities and their right to vote in Delhi.

For politicians, ex-army and CBI chiefs, and several other public representatives, including Delhi's current chief minister, the ECI could have a fast-track route for the VIP to make it into the final roll.

But for the poorest, who made it onto the draft voter list and yet got notices from the ECI, proving that they are genuine now means going through the rigmarole of documents, hearings and deadlines.

The Reporters’ Collective did a large data analysis, which the ECI tried to prevent, and followed it with ground reporting to show how the poor in Delhi will suffer the worst, even if the rich and powerful find a VIP route out of the chaos called SIR.

Demolitions Erase Homes

They also erase people’s votes and, with them, a key proof that helps establish where they lived, for how long and whether they qualify for state benefits. The Collective’s analysis of the deleted 47.6 lakh voters reveals that the poorest in the city have been hit the hardest. Here is what we found.

The ECI guidelines warn against a voter deletion rate of more than two percent at a polling booth during revision of the voter roll. Anything above that is considered suspicious and “must be cross verified personally by the Electoral Registration Officer.”

Yet across all 14,947 booths in Delhi’s 70 assembly constituencies, we found that only 51 remained within the two percent benchmark.

And at 639 booths, more than half the registered voters were removed.

We tried to map the booths that fall in areas where people’s homes were demolished by the government.

We identified booths where more than 70 percent of voters had been deleted. There were 29 such booths. Of these, nine were in localities where the government had demolished homes. In just these nine booths, 87.87 percent of the voters have been deleted. That is, of the 10,015 voters registered at these nine booths, 8,800 voters have been struck off the roll.

Several of them had been relocated by the government to new addresses. Yet the ECI did not accept their credentials and removed them.

The ECI regulations require even the homeless to be recognised as voters. But these poor and largely migrant citizens are now finding it difficult to get back their voter identity cards and the government entitlements they need to access through those cards.

For the analysis, we broke through ECI’s digital wall that prevents aggregate analysis of the SIR data. We downloaded the booth-wise ASDD list and compared deleted voters in each booth against the total. The Office of the Chief Electoral Officer caps the number of electors at every booth at 1,200. Using that as the benchmark, we calculated the rate of deletions for each polling booth which helped us map areas with the most deletions.

For those living in slums and Jhuggi Jhopri (JJ) clusters, the consequences of deletions extend beyond their vote. People, especially the poorest citizens of the city, need their electoral history to prove how long they lived at the demolished addresses. Registering afresh would sever that trail.

We followed displaced voters from four of the nine booths where the demolitions happened. More than a year later, we found them living at new addresses across Delhi. The SIR did not.

The Supreme Court of India is set to hear a writ petition on “logical discrepancies” and notices issued during Delhi’s revision process, along with other SIR-related matters on September 22.

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Thousands were Classified as “Absent” or “Untraceable”

Six months after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Delhi, more than 3,000 homes across 23 settlements were demolished, according to Frontline. These drives left at least 15,000 people homeless.

The revision is supposed to ensure that “no eligible citizen is left out,” which means verifying where voters live and registering them there. The exercise, we found, has failed to find even families living at an address assigned to them by the government itself.

On January 3, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed displaced families the keys to flats in Wazirpur under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. Their former homes, in the Jailorwala Bagh JJ cluster, were demolished in June 2025.

They have since been living in housing provided by the state. But when the draft rolls were published, 991 of them were deleted, with the majority classified as “absent/untraceable”. At the polling booth covering the housing complex, more than 80 percent of registered voters had been deleted.

We spoke to four booth-level officers (BLOs) across these nine booths. They said many of the voters had moved away. But we found that demolitions had not necessarily emptied these settlements, and those deleted were not always untraceable.

In Wazirpur, for instance, several residents were still awaiting rehabilitation after the demolition of their settlement. Also those who were rehabilitated, also lost their vote.

Similarly, in East Delhi’s Patparganj, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi demolished a settlement in July 2024, calling it an encroachment on the Yamuna floodplains. Most residents subsequently returned and rebuilt their homes. Yet the SIR deleted 1,057 of the 1,199 voters registered at the corresponding booth.

The settlement falls under polling booth 157. The BLO for the booth, Sovindra Kumar Gautam, said the names were removed because officials could not map the families to the 2002 electoral rolls. The 142 who made it to the list, he said, were largely “educated voters who could help us in mapping”.

‘The Jhuggi no Longer Exists. You have no Address’

Not everyone returns after their settlement is demolished. Many scattered across the city. We set out to find them.

Near the Barapullah drain in south Delhi’s Jangpura once stood Madrasi camp, home to hundreds of Tamil migrant families. The Delhi Development Authority demolished the homes of 370 families there in June 2025, arguing that clearing the settlement was necessary to clean the drain and prevent waterlogging in adjoining areas.

Of the displaced residents, 189 families were allotted Economically Weaker Section flats in Narela under the Delhi Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy, 2015. Others received no alternative housing and were forced to live in rented accommodation in nearby areas.

Madrasi camp fell under polling booth 58 in the Jangpura assembly constituency. Of the 1,093 voters registered there before the SIR, 934, or 85 percent, were deleted in the draft rolls.

One of them was Jayanthi S. Her home was demolished, but she was found ineligible for rehabilitation. Upon checking the draft rolls, we found her classified as “permanently shifted”.

Jayanthi had indeed shifted, but she had not disappeared. We found her living in rented accommodation in Ashram, close to the demolished settlement. She said her BLO had turned her away when she tried to register at her new address.

“I don’t have a home, so my vote was removed,” she said. “They told me: ‘The jhuggi no longer exists. You have no address, so your vote has been cancelled.’”

Registering at her rented address has not been easier. Jayanthi said landlords routinely refuse to provide tenants like her with rental agreements, leaving her without documentary proof of her new residence.

Forcing People to Register as New Voters

In some cases, people never left. Mukesh Chandra’s house still stands amid the rubble of homes in north Delhi’s Wazirpur. Like many others, he has pasted a copy of the Delhi High Court order protecting it from demolition outside his house.

Chandra has a receipt for the SIR enumeration form he submitted online. Still, in the electoral records, he and his wife are marked “absent/untraceable”. They did not receive enumeration forms during the SIR process or a notice later stating the grounds for their deletion.

Chandra is one of 991 voters deleted from booth 44 of the Wazirpur assembly constituency, which covers part of the Jailorwala Bagh JJ cluster that was demolished in June 2025. More than 80 percent of the voters previously registered in this booth are missing from the draft roll.

The Election Commission recently clarified that voters displaced by demolitions can use Form 8 to shift their address for inclusion in electoral rolls. But that remedy begins with the assumption that the voter moved. Chandra did not.

Chandra is one of at least 20 residents The Collective spoke to in this JJ cluster. Despite the Commission’s clarification, residents say that their BLOs have now asked them to register as new voters using Form 6.

Not Just a Voter ID Card

To return to the voter roll using Form 6 would mean starting from scratch, and breaking the electoral history they need to claim state benefits.

In the Jailorwala Bagh JJ cluster, for example, residents claimed applications for flats under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana had been rejected on one common ground: “voter card not verified.” Court records also show claims being rejected because applicants could not be found in the electoral rolls between 2012 and 2015.

The state therefore used electoral history to decide who had lived in the settlement long enough to qualify for rehabilitation. The original policy required residents to establish that they had lived there before February 2015. A June 2026 review extended the cut-off to January 1, 2025.

Form 6 may restore their names to the electoral roll. But it cannot restore the electoral history that was attached to every voter until now. As fresh applicants, residents will be issued new voter identity (EPIC) numbers, which will not match their earlier ones breaking the documentary trail linking them to Jailorwala Bagh before 2025. For hundreds still awaiting rehabilitation, that break could prove decisive: under the 2026 housing policy, they may not qualify for a home.

“If we don't have a valid voter ID card over the years, then we lose all proof of residence,” said Ajay, a local resident and lawyer who has sent a legal notice to the Election Commission on the arbitrariness of voter deletions in Wazirpur.

On Tuesday, September 22, the Supreme Court is set to hear a petition questioning the SIR process in Delhi and the 31.6 lakhs who have been sent notice to prove their credentials, beyond the 47.6 lakhs who have already been deleted.

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