Evaluate the balance between electoral roll purification and the risk of disenfranchisement of genuine voters.

An accurate electoral roll is the foundation of free and fair elections, and the Representation of the People Act, 1950 obliges the ECI to register only those "ordinarily resident" in a constituency and to bar duplicate registration [4]. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) advances this purpose, but its recent application shows the purification–inclusion balance is not yet correctly struck.

The case for purification

• Statutory mandate: bloated rolls carrying deceased, duplicate and permanently shifted entries violate the "one elector, one constituency" principle of the 1950 Act [4].
• Method: SIR uses house-to-house enumeration by Booth Level Officers (BLOs), pre-filled forms and verification of legacy data to remove ineligible entries while retaining eligible citizens [2].
• Built-in safeguards: publication of a draft roll, a claims-and-objections window (Form 7 route), supervisory cross-verification and sample audits mean deletion from the draft is not final [2].

The risk of disenfranchisement

• Scale: in Telangana about 73.4 lakh of 3.38 crore electors were deleted; in Karnataka over 1.07 crore of 5.54 crore were excluded under the ASDDO category — roughly a fifth of the rolls in each state [1].
• Arbitrary reason-coding: the "Shifted" and "Absent" tags were applied inconsistently across comparable constituencies [1], since the Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2023 defines an absentee only as one away for a "limited period" and offers BLOs no operational test [3].
• Burden reversal: the onus of restoration shifts to the elector, hitting migrant workers, the urban poor and mobile populations hardest — precisely those least able to file claims in time.

Purification is legally sound and administratively necessary; the imbalance lies not in the objective but in unguided discretion at the last mile. Codified criteria separating "shifted" from "absent", a speaking notice before every deletion, published reason-wise audits and targeted re-enrolment camps would align SIR with Article 324's promise. A roll that is both clean and complete best secures the citizen's right to vote.