The complaints heard at a public hearing in Musheerabad are not only about individual names disappearing from the electoral roll. They reveal how a city-level verification exercise can become difficult for residents to navigate when booth-level outreach is incomplete, household records are fragmented and the burden of proving eligibility falls back on people who say they have voted in several elections.
The hearing, conducted by the Telangana Voter Rights Forum, brought together residents whose names appeared in the ASDD list during the special intensive revision of the electoral roll. ASDD refers to voters classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate. According to official data cited in the report, Musheerabad recorded the highest proportion of deletions in Hyderabad district: 45.17 per cent, compared with a city average of 40.99 per cent.
As of June 10, Musheerabad had 3,10,116 voters. Of these, 1,40,070 were listed as deleted. The scale of that figure makes the issue larger than a series of isolated data-entry errors. It places the focus on how electoral administration functions in dense urban neighbourhoods, where families may move between nearby lanes, residents may be temporarily absent, and households may not receive or understand official forms and notices.
The accounts presented at the hearing illustrate the human consequences of those classifications. Jasibunnisa said her husband, Abdul Kareem Malik, was marked as dead even though he was alive and continuing to work. The family, she said, had lived in the constituency for at least eight years but had not received the enumeration form from the local booth-level officer. Malik was described as the family’s sole breadwinner.
Another resident, Jayasree, said her husband Saranappa’s name was deleted on the ground that he was untraceable, despite the family having lived in Bholakpur for 30 years. She also received a notice concerning a mismatch in her own name. Her question—why a long-standing voter should have to apply through Form-6 to restore a name—captures the institutional tension at the centre of the exercise: whether correction is being treated as a routine administrative safeguard or as a fresh obligation imposed on citizens whose names were already on the rolls.
Saibaba, a painter, said the names of 10 members of his family were deleted because they were considered to have permanently shifted. He told the panel that he had been away for a month after a relative’s death, while the family had sold its house and moved to an adjacent lane. The family did not submit the enumeration form, although he said he possessed Aadhaar and other documents.
These accounts are significant because they show how the categories used in a roll revision can collide with the realities of urban residence. A voter may be temporarily absent without having moved permanently. A household may relocate within the same neighbourhood without becoming ineligible to vote in the constituency. A name mismatch may require clarification rather than removal. A death classification, if incorrect, can erase a living voter from the administrative record.
The report also describes an audit conducted before the hearing by a 20-member volunteer team across polling booths 94 and 95 in Musheerabad, using the 2025 electoral rolls as the base list. The survey found, according to the team, that booth-level officers had not visited most homes. It also found that individual houses were linked to multiple polling booths, making the verification process difficult for residents to understand.
The team ultimately verified 1,829 voters across 78 polling booths because the polling booths were not contiguous. Dr Suneetha Achyuta of the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies said the volunteers returned after publication of the draft voter list and ASDD list to check whether voters had been included, whether they had received notices, the stated reason for those notices and whether they had been deleted under categories such as untraceable, shifted or dead.
That sequence matters. It suggests that the central administrative challenge is not only compiling a list, but creating a traceable chain between household verification, notice delivery, classification, draft publication and correction. If residents cannot tell which officer visited, which form was issued, why a name was classified in a particular way or what remedy applies, the process becomes difficult to contest even when the underlying record is wrong.
The role of booth-level officers is therefore central to the credibility of the exercise. The source report does not establish why officers allegedly failed to visit most homes or why multiple polling booths were linked to individual houses. It does, however, record the volunteer team’s findings and the residents’ accounts that they did not receive enumeration forms. Those claims point to a gap between a centrally designed revision process and the street-level conditions in which it must operate.
The problem is especially acute for working-class residents and daily wage earners. Attending hearings, obtaining documents, completing forms and returning to government offices all carry a time cost. For a household dependent on daily income, administrative correction is not a cost-free exercise. Jasibunnisa’s account makes that constraint explicit: she questioned who would take care of the family if she had to repeatedly pursue voter-related work while the household’s primary earner continued working.
The hearing panel included Prof. G. Haragopal, former chairman of the Telangana Education Commission; Akunuri Murali; Prof. Padmaja Shaw; and social activists S.Q. Masood and Rubina Nafees Fathima. The panel heard from several residents, many of them women, who were described as traumatised and frustrated by having to prove their eligibility again after voting in earlier elections.
The reported deletions also raise a question about the meaning of an electoral roll in a rapidly changing city. Urban neighbourhoods are not static administrative units. Families change addresses, homes are sold, tenants move, workers travel and households may be split across nearby streets. The administrative categories of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate are necessary for maintaining a reliable roll, but their use depends on accurate local verification and clear notice procedures.
The Musheerabad figures make the institutional stakes visible. A deletion rate of 45.17 per cent, compared with a Hyderabad district city average of 40.99 per cent, indicates a substantial difference between the constituency and the wider urban area. The supplied report does not explain the reasons for that difference, and no conclusion about its cause can be drawn from the available material. But the gap is large enough to warrant close scrutiny of the verification process, the distribution of notices and the reasons recorded for deletions.
The dispute over Form-6 is similarly important. Residents at the hearing demanded restoration of their names without mandatory submission of the form, arguing that they were genuine voters who had been incorrectly removed. The report records that demand but does not provide the Election Commission’s response or clarify the formal procedure applicable to every category of deletion. That missing response is an important part of the story still awaiting clarification.
What the evidence currently confirms is narrower but serious. Large numbers of names were listed as deleted in Musheerabad during the special intensive revision. Residents have disputed classifications including dead, untraceable and permanently shifted. A volunteer audit reported limited booth-level visits and confusion caused by multiple polling-booth linkages. The public hearing created a forum for those complaints, but it did not itself resolve the status of the deleted names.
The next test is whether each disputed entry receives a transparent, documented review and whether residents can access an effective correction mechanism without losing wages or navigating unclear procedures. Until the authorities respond to the specific complaints and explain the constituency’s unusually high deletion figure, the Musheerabad episode will remain a warning about the distance that can emerge between electoral data systems and the lived reality of urban households.
