Exclusive | Before Bengal’s SIR row, Maharashtra CEO red-flagged to ECI: Need more time

Maharashtra is among the top three states in the country by voter base, with over 9 crore electors in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the second highest in the country after Uttar Pradesh.

Indeed, the CEO’s letter was prescient given how the SIR process ran into trouble in West Bengal, where roughly 89 lakh names have been deleted from electoral rolls, prompting Supreme Court intervention and a controversy that has cast a shadow on elections in the state scheduled for April 23 and 29.

The second phase of the SIR began on November 4 in 12 states and UTs, including poll-bound West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

It took multiple deadline extensions spread over five months to complete the process. In West Bengal, 27.1 lakh voters, whose names have been deleted post adjudication before judicial officers, do not have sufficient time to appeal the decision, and now risk losing their opportunity to vote.

That the CEO’s office fore-warned the poll panel was recently conveyed to a Congress delegation when it met the state CEO a little over a week ago.

Maharashtra Congress chief Harshvardhan Sapkal confirmed this to The Sunday Express. “One of the demands raised by us was to take the 2001-02 SIR process of Maharashtra which lasted for 13 months under consideration while undertaking the process now. We were told by the officials that a letter requesting not to rush with the process has already been made with the ECI,” he said.

It is learnt that the letter explicitly sought that “sufficient time period may be given for said program, wherever there is no urgency or election is not imminent.”

The letter pointed to the SIR-2002 carried out in Maharashtra which ran from November 2001 to December 2002, lasting 13 months. Sources told The Sunday Express that the 2002 exercise in Maharashtra could not be completed within its original schedule precisely because insufficient time had been given even at that time for hearing and sorting objections.

“The idea is not to go on deleting names of voters but to revise the list. For this purpose, necessary time should be given,” an officer said.

The Maharashtra letter also flagged an additional activity not present in SIR 2002: the mapping of electors from current data to the last SIR data, describing it as a “time consuming” exercise that was not accounted for in the ECI’s guidelines.

The SIR 2002 involved 83 days of preliminary work, including review of officer postings, appointment and training of enumerators and supervisors, printing of forms and house numbering, before the house-to-house enumeration phase began on November 5, 2001.

The draft electoral roll was published on January 16, 2002. Despite a scheduled final publication date of March 25, 2002, the exercise ran on until December 3, 2002 after being rescheduled to allow necessary time for hearing and disposal of claims and objections.

The ECI did not respond to a request for comment sent on Friday. Chockalingam declined to comment on the matter. ECI officials, however, said most states, including Maharashtra, where the SIR is yet to be announced, had begun mapping existing electors with the last intensive revision roll.

In Maharashtra, though, the pace has been slow. “As of now, on an average 30-35% work has been completed in many of the districts. The process will gain pace in coming days and once the mapping is done, we will begin the next process,” an official told The Sunday Express.

Asked specifically about Maharashtra’s concern that the timeline was too tight, particularly given the additional step of mapping all existing voters to the 2002 roll, another ECI official said the next round of SIR was likely to begin only after the completion of the five ongoing Assembly elections on May 4, giving states sufficient time to complete the mapping.

The official also noted that the ongoing house-listing phase of the Census, running from April 1 to September 30, could push the SIR further, since both exercises rely on the same pool of local school teachers, anganwadi workers and state government employees.

The 12 states/UTs where SIR was announced on October 27 were Rajasthan, Goa, Lakshadweep, Puducherry, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Enumeration was from November 4. The process concluded on April 10 with the publication of the UP final roll. A total of 5.37 crore voter names (or 10.55%) across the states/UT were cut.