Census vs voter roll revision? Maharashtra may ask EC to postpone SIR in April

However, on Wednesday, a state-level conference on preparedness for Census 2027 was held in Mumbai, which was joined digitally by Registrar General and Census Commissioner (RGCC) Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan. During the conference, Additional Chief Secretary Seema Vyas announced that Census 2027 will be conducted in two phases.

The first phase, involving house-listing and housing census, will take place from May 16 to June 14, 2026. Prior to this, a self-enumeration facility will be available from May 1 to May 15, 2026. She noted that preparations for Census 2027 in the state are in the final stages and that the training process has commenced.

Sources within the office of Maharashtra’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) informed The Indian Express that undertaking SIR in April 2026 will be difficult. “The school exams continue till first or second week of April and teachers, who will participate in SIR will be busy. Later, the same government employees will be busy with ground work for Census. The SIR and Census work cannot be done at the same time,” an official from the office of the CEO told The Indian Express.

Approximately 2.64 lakh enumerators and supervisors will record data directly into the Census Management and Monitoring System using their mobile devices, thereby avoiding delays in data collection. Maharashtra Chief Secretary Rajesh Aggarwal also mentioned that a self-enumeration facility will be made available to citizens before the arrival of enumerators.

When contacted, Maharashtra CEO S Chockalingam declined to comment.

The SIR exercise involves door-to-door verification, removal of duplicate or ineligible entries, and inclusion of eligible voters who may have been left out of the rolls. Its rollout, however, has been marred by controversy since the first phase in Bihar, initiated in June last year. The exercise initially raised fears of exclusion over the number of documents the poll panel was seeking from existing voters to remain on the electoral roll. However, once the matter reached the Supreme Court, the top court’s interventions allayed some of these concerns by allowing Aadhaar to be considered as proof of eligibility.

The second leg of the SIR was rolled out in 12 states and Union Territories last last year and is currently underway. This phase, too, has seen glitches, forcing the Commission to repeatedly extend deadlines for verification and for the disposal of claims, objections and appeals regarding inclusion and exclusion from the draft electoral roll. The sharpest confrontation has been between the EC and the West Bengal government, prompting the Supreme Court to step in on multiple occasions to bridge what it described as a trust deficit between the two.

On Friday, the Supreme Court asked the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court to appoint judicial officers to decide claims and objections in the ongoing SIR exercise in West Bengal, noting an unfortunate blame game between the state government and the Election Commission of India.

Even as the exercise in the 12 states is yet to conclude, the Commission has now asked the remaining 22 States and Union Territories to prepare for conducting the SIR in April (the same time the first phase of the Census exercise is set to begin), raising concerns of administrative overlap and confusion in Maharashtra.