Arbitrary application of administrative criteria at the grassroots level can undermine constitutional guarantees. Discuss with reference to recent electoral roll revisions.

Article 324 vests superintendence of electoral rolls in the Election Commission, but the criteria it frames are applied by Booth Level Officers (BLOs) at the last mile. The ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) shows how uneven grassroots discretion can dilute constitutional guarantees.

How discretion enters the process

• SIR involves house-to-house enumeration and verification of old entries to remove deceased, permanently shifted and duplicate electors [1].
• Deletions are coded as Shifted, Absent, Deceased or Duplicate, but the ECI's Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2023 defines an "absentee" only as one away for a limited period, leaving no workable BLO-level test to separate "Absent" from "Shifted" [2].
• Ambiguous criteria plus volume pressure convert a verification exercise into subjective tagging.

Constitutional guarantees at stake

• Article 326 — universal adult suffrage: wrongful deletion is de facto disenfranchisement, though names remain restorable before final publication.
• Article 14 — arbitrariness: similar constituencies showing widely divergent reason-wise deletion patterns in Karnataka and Telangana indicate unequal treatment of like cases [3].
• Article 21 / due process — deletion without effective notice and hearing weakens procedural fairness.
• Free and fair elections as basic structure: Telangana's draft roll excluded roughly 73 lakh of 3.38 crore electors, Karnataka over 1 crore of 5.54 crore, mostly under "shifted"-type heads [3].

Social and administrative fallout

• Migrants, informal workers and the urban poor, likeliest to be absent at enumeration, bear the exclusion burden.
• Statutory remedies — claims and objections under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 [4] — place the correction burden on the citizen, not the state.

Roll purification and inclusion are complementary, not competing, goals. Precise operational definitions, mandatory recording and public disclosure of deletion reasons, third-party audit of BLO work, and targeted re-verification camps for migrant-heavy booths can secure both. A clean roll earns legitimacy only when every genuine elector on it, and every one removed from it, can trace a reason.