Bihar leaders find SIR draft rolls ‘difficult’ to compare

Opposition parties in Bihar on Monday (August 4, 2025) accused the Election Commission of India (EC) of “deliberately” making it “difficult” for them to compare the electoral rolls issued ahead of the Lok Sabha election in January 2024 with the draft rolls published on August 1 as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), even as the poll panel said that no party has filed any claim and objection for addition or deletion of names, yet.

The draft rolls have more than 65 lakh fewer names than the previous list. The EC has attributed this to deaths, migration and duplication. It said that in the past three days, 1,927 individual complaints have been raised.

All 12 political parties in Bihar have more than 1.6 lakh booth-level agents registered with the EC for the SIR.

Opposition leaders The Hindu spoke to pointed out several technical problems – the first being that the January 2024 electoral rolls are not available in machine-readable format – are making it difficult to run an analysis comparing it with the draft rolls.

The booth-level data of the deletions along with the reasons have not been provided in each district, the parties said. They pointed out that in case a person finds his name deleted from the rolls, he has to file a fresh application in Form 6, and such cases are not being categorised as complaints.

Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD) leader Manoj K. Jha said that the SIR is not “voter-friendly”, but “exclusion friendly”. “The draft electoral roll published after such a massive exercise should have been self-explanatory. You have handed out a consolidated draft roll to the political parties, without indicating who you have deleted and why, leaving it entirely on us to do the exercise in the limited time available,” he said.

The RJD’s Araria district president Manish Yadav said that he spent the last three days trying to procure detailed data. “While I have managed to get the data for Araria, I have been told by my colleagues from other districts that this data is not available to them,” he said. The RJD is planning to hold camps to allow the voters to come forward with complaints. The INDIA bloc is also planning to hold a march from August 10 to raise this issue.

CPI (ML) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya rejected the EC’s claims on no complaints from political parties. “We have filed several complaints with the Bihar CEO, how can they say there are no complaints. When an individual’s name is deleted, she/he has to file a fresh application, which the EC is not counting as a complaint,” he said.

Accusing the EC of being less than transparent, he said, “For example, we got the Darbhanga district electoral roll, where there are 30 lakh voters. Out of them two lakh are said to be permanently shifted, but we do not have booth-level data to do the verification.”

The party has set up technical teams to carry out the verification online and is also sending people for physical verification, though Mr. Bhattacharya said, it is a daunting task given the numbers involved and time given.

Congress leader Praveen Chakravarty said that without machine-readable electoral rolls of both January 2024 and the SIR draft roll, running analytical tools is difficult. “How can the onus of holding a free and fair election be on political parties? What if it is a newly constituted political party, don’t they have a right to have level-playing field, just because they don’t have the manpower to carry out verification,” he asked.

Voters have many options to check whether their names are there in the draft rolls, including on the EC website by searching with name, age, and district, or existing EPIC number. They can also do so on the Voter Helpline Mobile App or by sending their EPIC number as an SMS to 7738299899. Apart from this, they can physically check with the Booth Level Officer (BLO) or the party agents.

A couple of BLOs The Hindu reached out to said that most voters used phones to check for their names on the list. A sizeable number approached the BLO for physical verification.

Sunita Devi, an Anganwadi worker, who is the BLO at the Mohammadour SC Tola booth in Phulwari Assembly constituency, said most people had made it to the draft list in her booth and since all of them had phones, they were checking their names online.

As per SIR rules, the claims and objections are to be disposed by the Electoral Registration Officer concerned or the Assistant Electoral Registration Officer after the expiry of seven days. No name can be deleted from the draft list published without passing a speaking order by the ERO/AERO after an inquiry and after giving a fair and reasonable opportunity.