Discuss the constitutional and statutory basis of the Election Commission's power to revise electoral rolls. Examine concerns arising from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.

Article 324(1) vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls — not merely the conduct of polls — in the Election Commission of India (ECI) [1]. The ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) tests whether this wide power is being used to purify rolls or is, in practice, excluding genuine electors.

Constitutional basis

• Article 324(1) expressly covers preparation of rolls, making roll revision a core ECI function [1].
• Article 326 guarantees adult suffrage and Article 325 bars exclusion on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex — an accurate, inclusive roll is the precondition for both.
• In Mohinder Singh Gill v. CEC (1978), the Supreme Court held ECI's Article 324 powers to be plenary where the law is silent, though exercisable fairly and reasonably.

Statutory and procedural basis

• Section 21(2), RP Act 1950 requires revision before each general election; Section 21(3) empowers the ECI to direct a special revision, "for reasons to be recorded", in such manner as it thinks fit [2].
• The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 and ECI's Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2023 govern enumeration, Forms 6 and 7, and deletion categories.
• SIR Phase-III alone covers 16 States and 3 UTs, with about 3.94 lakh Booth Level Officers enumerating 36.73 crore electors [3].

Concerns arising

• Scale of deletion: Karnataka's draft roll excluded over 1.07 crore of 5.54 crore electors under the ASDDO head; Telangana saw about 73.4 lakh deletions from 3.38 crore [4].
• Arbitrariness: reason-codes "Shifted" and "Absent" are applied inconsistently across comparable constituencies, reflecting the Manual's imprecise definitions and unguided BLO discretion [4].
• Exclusion risk: migrants and the urban poor, often away from usual residence, are likeliest to be wrongly tagged.
• Due process: the burden of restoration shifts to the elector within a short claims-and-objections window.

The ECI's own safeguards — supervisory cross-verification, random audits of deleted entries and publication of draft rolls [5] — point the way forward: codified, uniform deletion criteria, mandatory recorded reasons with elector notice, and third-party audit before final publication. Purity and inclusiveness of the roll are complementary, not competing, mandates of Article 324.