The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is an exercise undertaken by the Election Commission of India to verify and revise electoral rolls through house-to-house enumeration, pre-filled forms, and verification of old voter data.
The SIR aims to ensure that electoral rolls across India are accurate, by eliminating the names of deceased, permanently shifted, duplicate & non-citizen voters, while ensuring that eligible citizens are not left out. The nationwide SIR process was announced on 27 October 2025 by the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar from Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi.
In May 2026, the Supreme Court of India upheld the legitimacy of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and held it to be in consonance with the Representation of the People Act, noting that the Election Commission has a Constitutional obligation to conduct free and fair elections.
Background The Election Commission of India (ECI) periodically conducts an "intensive revision" of electoral rolls, which involves door-to-door enumeration of voters. An intensive revision was last conducted in 2003. During 2025–2026, ECI ordered a "special intensive revision" (SIR), starting with the state of Bihar in July 2025. The meaning of "special" has not been specified. The Indian Express opined that it indicates the use of ECI's "discretionary powers" under Section 21(3) of the Representation of People Act, 1950.Ritika Chopra, Why is the Election Commission revising electoral rolls in Bihar, and when have revisions happened previously?, The Indian Express, 11 July 2025. Former Chief Election Commissioner O. P. Rawat stated that the term "special" is used when exercise does not conform to the standard template of revision, but tinkers with certain elements.Shivasundar, Nationwide SIR is a planned disenfranchisement of the poor and minorities, The News Minute, 4 November 2025. The most important change from the previous intensive revisions to 2025–2026 was the role of the enumerators in clarifying the electors' citizenship.Darshana Mitra, The SIR, A Long Road to Exile?, The India Forum, 1 May 2026.
Citizenship determination in India is a complicated issue since the Indian citizenship law is a complex mix of citizenship-by-birth and citizenship-by-descent. Large sections of the populace do not possess documents that can demonstrate their citizenship, especially the poor, the disadvantaged sections and women. An exercise to construct a National Register of Citizens for Assam took five years to complete, causing inexorable trauma to millions of citizens and eventually left out 1.9 million people from the register, whose status is yet undetermined. The exercise is generally considered a failure.Kaushik Deka, Voter rolls: Who is a citizen?, India Today, 6 October 2025.
Since the 1980s, the ECI has been concerned about preventing the inclusion of foreign nationals in electoral rolls. It also received multiple complaints from the chief ministers of border states about the enrolment of foreign nationals. But the ECI had upheld the "sanctity" of the existing rolls, by placing the burden of proof on those objecting to the inclusion rather than the electors themselves.
During the 1997 intensive revision of the electoral rolls in Assam, the Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) were asked to decide on the inclusion or exclusion of the electors. Based on spot checks by Local Verification Officers, the EROs doubted the citizenship of roughly 300,000 people, who were then marked as "D-voters". Many of them were referred to Foreigners' Tribunals for deciding their citizenship status, put into detention camps, and even pushed into Bangladesh.
Overview Bihar SIR The ECI ordered an SIR in the state of Bihar on 24 June 2025, four months before the state was scheduled to hold its next Legislative Assembly election. Booth Level Officers (BLOs) made house-to-house visits and distributed pre-filled enumeration forms containing names of the electors along with Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers and other data. The electors were asked to affix a photograph, fill in their date of birth as well as the names and EPIC numbers of their parents. If they were not already included in the "legacy" electoral rolls from around 2003, they also had to attach proof of their citizenship. The ECI stipulated 11 types of documents they could provide. Some of the common identification documents carried by people, such as Aadhaar cards, EPICs, ration cards and National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) documents, were excluded. Identification documents had to be provided by electors not only for themselves but also their parents as warranted by the Citizenship Act (along with amendments in 1986 and 2003).
People had considerable difficulty coming up with the stipulated documents. For example, birth certificates were among the stipulated documents, but were carried by only 2 percent of the population. Matriculation or college certificates were carried by only a 10 percent of the people of age 40–60. It was later reported that the majority of the voters did not have even a single one of the 11 stipulated documents.Soni Mishra, SIR 2.0: Bihar's shadow spreads, Frontline, 30 October 2025. However, unofficially, it was learnt that the BLOs had been told to accept Aadhaar cards and EPICs as verifying documents. Due to the tight schedule, the document upload was carried out after the draft roll was published and the ECI reported that documents were received from 98.2% of the electors.Bihar SIR: Received documents from 98.2% voters, says Election Commission of India, The Hindu, 24 August 2025.
When the draft election roll was published in early August, it had 72.4 million names, 6.5 million fewer than the prevailing roll. ECI said that the deletions included 2.2 million dead, 3.6 million that migrated out of the state, and 0.7 million were duplicate entries.Geeta Pandey, New voters list in Indian state includes wrong photos and dead people, BBC News, 11 August 2025. An analysis by Hindustan Times found no discernible pattern to the deletions.Abhishek Jha, Nishant Ranjan, Roshan Kishore, Bihar SIR: Key takeaways from draft electoral roll after ECI’s revision, Hindustan Times, 2 August 2025.
Supreme Court review In early July, petitions were filed in the Supreme Court by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and several opposition politicians. ADR argued that the onerous requirements for documents violated the universal adult franchise under Article 326 of the Indian Constitution. PUCL argued that ECI was mandated to enable the right to vote for all adult citizens and so it had to ensure that those with "document deficits" were not left out of the process.
In the initial hearing on 10 July, the judges framed the case in terms of three questions: whether the ECI had the right to undertake such an exercise, whether it was following the correct procedure, and whether it had allowed sufficient time for the process. The ECI argued in its counter-affidavit that it was vested with the power to scrutinise the eligibility of voters, which included citizenship. The court contested ECI's claims that the 11 documents were widely available and pressed it to consider the inclusion of Aadhaar cards and EPICs.
The eventual judgment came in May 2026, after the second round of SIR exercises had already been initiated. The court upheld the ECI's right to conduct SIR as part of its constitutional obligation, as well as to verify citizenship status to the "limited extent of determining inclusion or exclusion from the electoral roll". Electors purged from the rolls on suspicion of being non-citizens should be referred for adjudication by a competent authority under the Citizenship Act. The Court also observed that the enquiry of the ECI must itself be quasi-judicial in character, ensure the right to a fair hearing, and the persons should be informed of the grounds on which they are suspected to be foreigners. The Supreme Court also directed the ECI to include Aadhaar cards among the allowed identification documents, and to publish all the names deleted from electoral rolls in an accessible form.R. Sai Spandana, Revision of Electoral Rolls in Bihar | Day 5: SC directs ECI to publish details of deleted names, Supreme Court Observer, 14 August 2025.
Second phase The second phase of SIR exercises covering 12 states and union territories were announced on 27 October 2025. They included the four states, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Puducherry, where Assembly elections were due to be held in 2026. In addition, SIR was also conducted in Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep. Assam, another state due to hold elections in 2026, was left out of the SIR process on the grounds that the Supreme Court-monitored NRC exercise was yet to conclude.
The ECI modified the procedures based on the experience from Bihar and the issues raised during the Supreme Court hearings. Documents were not collected in the enumeration phase. Instead, the enumeration forms had been modified in order to link the electors with their own records or their parents' records in the previous intensive revision conducted anywhere in the country. Only in cases where such "linkages" could not be made with "legacy" electors would documents be required. The electors that could not establish such linkages were called "unmapped" electors. In addition, the ECI deployed ERONET software which flagged cases of "logical discrepancies", which involved spelling variations, age/relationship mismatches and other inconsistencies. People mapped with six or more progeny and those with an age gap of less than 15 years or more than 50 years with their parents were flagged. All such cases were asked to appear before the EROs for hearings.Damini Nath, How West Bengal SIR played out differently from other states, what it means for rest of country, The Indian Express, 7 March 2026.
In all states except West Bengal, draft rolls were published in December and January and then hearings by EROs were conducted. By April, 64.4 million (6.44 crore) names were removed for the reasons of being absent, shifted, dead and duplicated, and an additional 6.3 million (63 lakh) names removed after objections and adjudication.Consolidated voters’ list of 9 States and 3 UTs that underwent SIR Phase II trimmed by 10.2%, The Hindu, 13 April 2026.
Case of West Bengal In poll-bound West Bengal, the SIR process worked differently as noted by The Indian Express. The initial process flagged 3.2 million "unmapped" voters, and 13.6 million electors for "logical discrepancies". All such electors had to appear for hearings.Kaushik Deka, Special Intensive Revision: Voters await verdict, India Today, 16 March 2026. In addition, the ECI asked Chief Electoral Officer in West Bengal to appoint "micro-observers" to keep a watch on EROs and Assistant EROs trying to decide the cases. These new officials alleged that the EROs were not deleting ineligible electors and were uploading improper documents. The Supreme Court, which was hearing a batch of petitions challenging the process, noted the "trust deficit" between the state government and the ECI. It then used its powers under Article 142 of Indian constitution to pass a decree in the interest of complete justice, and placed all the remaining cases under judicial review. The Calcutta High Court was asked to deploy serving and former district judges to oversee the pending cases.Atri Mitra, West Bengal SIR: Fate of over 50 lakh voters in lurch as judicial officers start vetting documents, The Indian Express, 24 February 2026.