Mass deletion of electors during roll revision exercises raises the tension between accuracy of electoral rolls and the right to franchise. Discuss with reference to recent SIR exercises.

Article 326 guarantees universal adult suffrage, but the right becomes operative only through the electoral roll. The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) pursues a clean roll; the scale of deletions it has produced makes purity and participation pull against each other.

The case for intensive revision

• Statutory mandate: Section 21(3), Representation of the People Act, 1950 empowers the ECI to order a special revision for reasons recorded [3].
• Roll integrity: deceased, shifted and duplicate entries inflate rolls and dilute the genuine vote; SIR uses house-to-house enumeration and verification of legacy data, covering about 51 crore electors across 9 States and 3 UTs in Phase-II [1].

Safeguards exist, but scale strains them

• ECI prescribes two-three BLO visits, reasons recorded before deletion under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, and a statutory claims and objections window (Forms 6, 7, 8) before finalisation [1].
• Yet Maharashtra's draft roll excluded 2.07 crore of 9.79 crore electors (21.14%) across 288 constituencies, with Pune worst affected — more than Uttar Pradesh's 2.04 crore deletions despite UP's far larger electorate of 13.4 crore [4].
• Deletion is administrative and automatic; restoration demands individual initiative, documents and travel — an asymmetry that penalises migrants, tenants and the urban poor most likely to be marked "shifted".

The transparency deficit

• ECI's own Manual on Electoral Rolls requires publication of the Elector-to-Population (EP) ratio after every revision [2]; its non-disclosure during SIR leaves the extent of wrongful exclusion unverifiable and weakens a self-imposed accountability norm.

Accuracy and franchise are complementary, not competing, goals: a roll is credible only if it is both clean and complete. Publishing EP ratios constituency-wise, issuing speaking orders for every deletion, holding special camps for migrant and low-literacy electors, and extending the claims period in high-deletion districts would reconcile the two. Where doubt persists, erring on the side of inclusion best honours the constitutional promise of one citizen, one vote.