SIR in Uttar Pradesh | The first cut is the deepest

Sometime in early 2000 Vimarsh Bajpai moved out of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s capital city, for professional reasons. Over the years, he has moved across India for work, and now lives in Delhi, though he owns a house in Lucknow.

His Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC), issued in 1995, a year after he turned 18, shows him registered at Arya Nagar in Lucknow. He was also registered as a voter in his ancestral village of Mohammadpur in Unnao district, where he owns property, but has no idea whether he is still on the electoral rolls there or not.

When the Election Commission of India (EC) announced the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Uttar Pradesh, the communications professional was unable to fill the enumeration form, as he simply didn’t know where to get one.

Apoorva Snehil Katayayan moved residences within Lucknow, from Lucknow East to Lucknow Cantonment Assembly seat. He contacted his last landlord and Booth Level Officer (BLO) for his enumeration form, but the 40-year-old businessman was asked to fill Form 6, to register as a fresh voter from his new address.

Ayush Mehrotra and his father Rajeevdas Mehrotra, residents of Lucknow West Assembly seat, did not find their names in the draft list despite filling the enumeration form. The BLO cited technical glitches on the website for the error. The fact that Rajeevdas is the brother of Samajwadi Party MLA Ravidas Mehrotra created a minor political storm.

At 2.89 crore, the number of names deleted in U.P. is the highest for any State or Union Territory in absolute numbers where SIR has been conducted so far. In terms of percentages, at 18.7%, it is the second after the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar islands.

About 14% of the deletions are listed as people having permanently migrated or not found during the verification process.

The major hit has been taken by urban areas, with Lucknow topping the list, followed by Ghaziabad, an urban centre adjoining the National Capital Region. In the SIR process, over 12 lakh names out of almost 40 lakh voters have been deleted from the 2025 voter rolls of Lucknow, the highest for any district in U.P.

The question of home

More than 500 kilometres away from Lucknow, in Gautam Buddha Nagar, adjoining Delhi, Kalpana Halder, a domestic worker catering to the city’s high-rise apartments, had her name registered in Noida as well as in her home town in Murshidabad district, West Bengal. When the SIR process began, her name was generated at both places. She chose Jalangi Assembly constituency in West Bengal.

While Lucknow saw 30% of names deleted, Ghaziabad saw 28%, Kanpur 25%, Prayagraj 24%, and Gautam Buddha Nagar 23.5%. A voter of Booth number 412 of SAM Inter College, Saharanpur Assembly constituency, who did not wish to be named, says he was registered in both the city and back in his ancestral village Harora, within the Saharanpur district. When the SIR was announced, he decided to retain his voter registration back in his village instead of the city.

Ground-level political party workers are worried that with many city dwellers registering themselves in their villages, their carefully calibrated pitch to different voting bases may be upset. “Many want to vote in the gram panchayat elections, as there, even one vote matters. Sometimes they or their family members are candidates,” says Gaurav Garg, district media in-charge of the BJP in Saharanpur. Another reason is that many associate voting rights from a particular place with owning property in that area, though the two are not correlated. According to the EC rules, people are eligible to vote from places where they live, and not necessarily where they own property.

Several BLOs, who are appointed by the EC, as well as booth-level agents (BLAs), appointed by political parties, say that a lot of duplication is because a large chunk of people are migrant workers. Most, who come from Bihar and West Bengal, rent rooms in numerous urban villages in Delhi’s suburbs of Noida and Ghaziabad, and in U.P.’s big cities of Lucknow and Kanpur.

Data of the voter list of polling booth no. 2 in Harola village, Makanpur, Noida, for example, shows that out of 1,148 names, 148 had duplicate voter registrations from outside the State. The voters have chosen to retain the registration back in their native places. Overall, 25.47 lakh voters (1.65%) were registered at more than one place.

Congress leader Gurdeep Singh Sappal and his family moved from Ghaziabad, which falls under Sahibabad Assembly constituency, to Noida a year ago. He says he has all their documents in place and their names were on the 2003 voter list. Yet, they were left out, and now have been asked to fill Form 6.

Form 6, used for fresh voter registrations, includes a declaration which says that the voter is not registered at any other Assembly constituency of the country. Any attempt at getting registered at two places is an offence which can result in an FIR being filed in a police station.

“The system is flawed,” Sappal says. “While the EC is accepting Form 8 for correction of entries in the current voter lists, it is not accepting it for change of residence. On one hand they are linking presence in the 2003 rolls to citizenship, on the other they are forcing me and my family to delete our old voter records,” he says, adding that he plans to approach the court in this matter.

Voter apathy with form-filling

BLOs in urban centres complain of voter apathy during the enumeration phase. They say they had to visit people’s homes many times to get them to fill the enumeration forms. This is not true of rural areas, they say, adding that minority-dominated areas are also not facing this problem.

Residents in towns like Deoband with a sizeable Muslim population say the citizenship bogey raised by the SIR has worried the community. In the city, known for the Darul Uloom Islamic seminary, special camps were set up by several NGOs and local community leaders to help people fill forms.

The EC has maintained that if voters are not mapped to the last SIR in 2003, they must produce documents mandated by it to prove their identity and citizenship.

Sitting in his elegant living room, metres away from the Darul Uloom in Deoband, Mohd. Wajahat Shah, a retired teacher from a primary school, says he has spent months since the SIR was announced helping people link their names to 2003 voter lists, get their documents in order, and later fill the enumeration forms.

Shah asserts that though the draft roll has seen 100% coverage of those who have filled the enumeration forms, the real battle begins now when unmapped voters are called for hearings. Hearings are held at various locations in each Assembly constituency, where people can prove their identity and citizenship.

About 70 km from Deobandh is Sardhana, in Meerut district. Down the narrow, dusty lanes of western Uttar Pradesh’s sugarcane belt, in a sudden open space stands the majestic and surprisingly pristine white structure of the Basilica of Our Lady of Graces.

The over 200-year-old structure built by then ruler Begum Samru, a Christian convert from Islam, is one of the largest churches in north India. The town is known for this church and the festivities held here around the year.

However, Mohd. Ali Shah, a scion of the erstwhile royal family of Sardhana, has only the SIR on his mind. He sits in his living room-cum-office sifting through bunches of different forms of the EC, all spread across a large centre table. Ali Shah has been leading a team of 65 people comprising local Samajwadi Party leaders, BLAs, and youth volunteers helping people negotiate the paperwork associated with the SIR.

Sardhana is part of the Muzaffarnagar Lok Sabha seat, which witnessed large-scale communal violence in 2013. Sardhana Assembly seat was represented by BJP’s Sangeet Som for two terms in 2012 and 2017. However, in the 2022 Assembly poll, he was defeated by sitting MLA Atul Pradhan, who belongs to the Samajwadi Party.

Now, with the enumeration phase over and the draft voter list having been published on January 6, Ali Shah’s team has shifted focus to those who could not be mapped to the 2003 voter lists when the last SIR was conducted, and are likely to be served notices and called for hearings.

He patiently explains to a voter the nuances of filling the registration form for his wife. The IT professional-turned-businessman says his team began awareness drives regarding the entire process and documents associated with it way back when the SIR was announced in October.

As part of the awareness drive, he made and uploaded videos on social media and took to the Sardhana streets with a loudspeaker, explaining the process of filling the forms and getting documents in order.

A local local EC official, who did not wish to be named, says documents, especially for women, were a challenge. He says that the early community mobilisation helped.

What lies ahead

More than 100 km away from Sardhana in the city of Saharanpur, local BJP workers have gathered at the SAM Inter College, a polling booth. BLO Amita Gupta is sitting with the recently-published draft electoral rolls published earlier this week. Some of the workers say they will now focus on getting names of genuine voters — who have been left out for various reasons — added to the final list, by helping them fill Form 6.

According to the new schedule announced by the EC after three extensions to the SIR process, the period for receiving claims and objections will remain open from January 6 to February 6 and the final rolls will be published on March 6.

Meanwhile, the District Election Office in Ghaziabad has officials gearing up to prepare for the battle ahead: of collecting documents during the hearings. In the first round of SIR in Bihar in mid-2025, the EC had mandated that in case of voters who could not be mapped to the last SIR — held two decades ago — documents had to be collected during the enumeration phase.

However in the second round, the poll body directed that the documents in case of unmapped voters would be collected only after publication of the draft electoral rolls, when notices would be issued and voters called for hearings.

A senior officer at the EC office in Ghaziabad says that additional Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AERO) have been deputed. Beginning January 15-16, hearings will begin of people who could not be mapped to the 2003 SIR roll. One AERO is expected to conduct 50 hearings in a day. Sources in the Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer’s office, however, say in many cases, the BLOs might be asked to collect the documents needed and submit them to the AERO office. This may ease the process for voters.

The SIR process in Uttar Pradesh took 62 days and saw three extensions.

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Edited by Sunalini Mathew