The Delhi SIR has turned a routine exercise in electoral-roll revision into a test of how the capital’s administrative systems identify, verify and restore citizen records. A public audit across 258 households in two polling booths in Okhla found that more than 100 voters had been classified as absent, permanently shifted, dead or duplicate, even though several said they had lived at the same addresses for decades and had submitted enumeration forms.
The findings are significant because the errors were not limited to one type of documentation problem. Residents described being marked “untraceable/absent”, “permanently shifted” or dead. In at least one case, a voter’s record appeared in the draft roll under a different EPIC number. In another, family members living at the same address received different outcomes after the enumeration process. These cases point to a system in which a person’s continued presence in a neighbourhood does not necessarily translate into a secure place on the electoral roll.
The public hearing was held in Batla House for residents of G and K blocks, covering polling booths 61 and 65. It was organised by Jan Sarokar, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Voter Adhikar Manch and the National Federation of Indian Women. More than 150 voters registered to present their cases before a panel that included Supreme Court advocates Nayantara Roy and Sumita Hazarika and transparency activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri. The exercise was not an official government hearing, but it exposed the gap between administrative processes and the ability of residents to navigate them.
Okhla’s wider numbers make that gap more consequential. The constituency had more than 1.85 lakh voters in the draft roll published after the SIR enumeration phase. More than 67,000 names were placed on the notice list, while nearly 1.6 lakh appeared in the ASDD list published during the revision process, according to the report. Okhla recorded the second-highest rate of deletions among Delhi constituencies. The scale means that the problem cannot be understood only as a collection of individual mistakes. It is also a question of how mass verification exercises are designed and supervised in dense, mobile and socially diverse urban neighbourhoods.
The ASDD classification is particularly important because it converts uncertainty about a voter’s status into an administrative obstacle. A resident who is temporarily away, whose address has been recorded differently, whose form was not collected or whose identity record has been duplicated may appear in a category associated with absence, shifting, death or duplication. The consequences are not identical, but the practical effect can be similar: the voter must spend time proving eligibility and may be directed to apply afresh.
That is what happened to Faiyaz Ahmed, a 74-year-old retired professor of mechanical engineering at Jamia Millia Islamia University, who said he had lived at the same address for more than five decades. He was marked “untraceable/absent”, while his wife, Anjum Ara, was listed as “permanently shifted”. Their son said he had submitted completed enumeration forms for both parents, but only his own name appeared in the draft roll. He collected Form 6 for his parents, even though they were not new residents or first-time voters.
Naeemuddin, who said he had lived at the same address for 30 years, was similarly marked as permanently shifted. He told the newspaper that a booth-level officer had photographed him and obtained his signature on a form. His case illustrates the difficulty of resolving a record when the citizen has evidence of residence but does not know how that evidence was processed within the electoral system.
The cases also reveal an information problem. The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s office has held special camps every weekend since September 20 at all polling stations. It has also directed field officers to re-verify ASDD entries through door-to-door visits and restore the names of eligible voters. Yet around 20 people who spoke to The Hindu said they were unaware of the camps. Some did not know who their booth-level officer was. Others said their BLOs had not contacted them.
This is not a minor communication failure. In an urban administration, access to a correction mechanism depends on residents knowing that the mechanism exists, understanding which form applies to them and finding the official responsible for receiving it. When the affected population is large, relying on citizens to discover the process through social workers or public meetings places a higher burden on those whose records have already been questioned.
The Form 6 process adds another layer of complexity. Form 6 is intended for new voter enrolment, but residents excluded from the draft roll were advised to use it to seek fresh inclusion. At least 110 people collected copies of the form at the hearing, along with a declaration seeking details of their or their relatives’ previous SIR records. The organisers said they were directing applicants to polling stations where BLOs were present because they were not authorised to collect the applications themselves.
This creates a structural mismatch between the citizen’s problem and the administrative remedy. A person who believes that an existing record was wrongly removed is not necessarily seeking a new identity in the electoral system. They are seeking restoration, an explanation of the deletion and confirmation that previous voting records have not disappeared. The report does not establish how every Form 6 application will be matched to prior records, but the experiences described show why residents perceive fresh enrolment as an inadequate or confusing response.
The data on form disposal reinforces the concern about administrative capacity. According to the weekly constituency-wise forms disposal report cited in the report, only 569 Form 6 applications were disposed of between August 31 and October 4, while Form 7 disposals were nearly six times higher. Form 7 is used for deletion-related applications. The comparison does not by itself establish why the numbers differ, but it demonstrates that deletion and enrolment activity are moving through the system at very different rates during the revision.
The Election Commission’s stated objective, as relayed by the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s office, is that no eligible voter should be left out of the electoral roll. The same office has said that 78.5% of “no mapping” and “logical discrepancy” cases in Delhi had been resolved. That figure indicates that the administration is processing a large volume of problems, but it does not answer the questions raised by residents in Okhla: how were the original classifications made, how were affected voters informed and how can citizens independently verify that a correction has been completed?
The Okhla cases also show why electoral-roll revision is an urban governance issue. Cities produce complex address and identity conditions. Families may share buildings, records may use different spellings or identifiers, tenants and long-term residents may coexist, and people may be absent when verification visits occur without having moved permanently. A system that treats a failed contact or inconsistent record as evidence of disappearance risks confusing administrative visibility with actual residence.
That risk is heightened when public institutions communicate mainly through camps, forms and field-level contacts without ensuring that residents can identify the correct official or understand the status of their case. The public hearing became an informal bridge between citizens and the formal system, but it also demonstrated that community organisations were performing a function that the official process had not made sufficiently accessible.
The next procedural milestone is the final electoral roll, scheduled for publication on December 4. Applications received through Form 6 until October 30 will be considered for inclusion, according to the report. Before that deadline, the administration’s door-to-door re-verification and special camps will determine whether eligible residents wrongly placed in ASDD categories are restored through the official process.
What the evidence currently confirms is a large-scale documentation and communication problem, with more than 100 disputed classifications identified in a limited public audit and many more names affected across Okhla. What remains less clear is the precise chain of decisions behind each error and whether corrections will restore existing records or require fresh enrolment. Those questions will be answered only through transparent case-level verification, timely disposal of applications and the publication of the final roll.
