Nearly 40% of voters in Mumbai’s Mumbadevi Assembly constituency have been placed in categories such as permanently shifted, dead, untraceable or absent, duplicate and other reasons during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, Congress MLA Amin Patel has alleged.
Patel, who represents the constituency, has written to Maharashtra chief electoral officer S Chockalingam seeking safeguards against the wrongful exclusion of voters from the draft roll. He said several residents had been placed in these categories despite submitting forms and details during the verification exercise.
The Mumbadevi constituency includes Dongri, Nagpada and Kamathipura and has been represented by Patel since 2009. In his letter, he questioned how information collected during the SIR could be followed by the exclusion of voters from the draft roll. He urged election authorities not to remove names without proper verification.
“Forms have been accepted from people, yet they have been marked as dead. There are so many such cases,” Patel said, according to the report. He also said that some residents had been unable to locate booth-level officers (BLOs), while others encountered uncertainty over the format of Form 6 following recent Supreme Court proceedings.
Chockalingam said he had not seen Patel’s letter but maintained that the categorisation was not limited to Mumbai or Maharashtra. He attributed the issue partly to urban mobility, saying that around 40% of people nationally were not found at their original addresses during address and related verification. Such voters were placed in five categories and their names did not appear in the draft list, he said.
The chief electoral officer said affected voters could apply through Form 6 to have their names included. The form has become a point of dispute after a Supreme Court bench led by the Chief Justice rejected the Election Commission’s claim that the court had approved a declaration attached to it. The court made clear that it had not approved any modification to the declaration, the report said.
State electoral officials said Form 6 applications would be accepted under the prescribed procedure and in view of the Supreme Court’s observations. Decisions on the applications will be taken in accordance with the final outcome of the court proceedings.
In Maharashtra, the enumeration exercise has been completed and electoral officials have verified voter details. Officials said BLOs collected information and signatures from residents, while people reported dead, shifted elsewhere, absent from their registered addresses or found to have duplicate entries in another area were excluded from the draft roll.
Public representatives have also been asked to verify the published draft roll and flag missing or incorrect names. For residents in a densely populated and highly mobile constituency such as Mumbadevi, the next stage will depend on whether disputed exclusions are identified and corrected through the prescribed application and verification process.
