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The Election Commission of India (ECI) has asked for the electoral rolls for Bihar to be prepared afresh. All electors must submit an enumeration form, and those registered after 2003 have to additionally provide documentation establishing their citizenship.
This “special intensive revision” of rolls will eventually cover all states and Union Territories, the ECI has said. The process in Bihar, where Assembly elections are due before November, began on Wednesday (June 25), and will end with the publication of the final electoral roll on September 30.
Article 324(1) of the Constitution gives the ECI the power of “superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of the electoral rolls for, and the conduct of” elections to Parliament and state legislatures.
Under Section 21(3) of The Representation of the People Act, 1950, the ECI “may at any time… direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency or part of a constituency in such manner as it may think fit”.
The Registration of Electors’ Rules, 1960, says the revision of rolls can be carried out “either intensively or summarily or partly intensively and partly summarily, as the [ECI] may direct”. In an intensive revision, the electoral roll is prepared afresh; in a summary revision, the roll is amended.
Special summary revisions take place every year, and the electoral roll is updated before each Lok Sabha and state Assembly election. Intensive revisions have been carried out in 1952-56, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1966, 1983-84, 1987-89, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2002, 2003 and 2004, the ECI said in its order issued on Tuesday.
The ECI order says that “during the last 20 years significant change in electoral roll has taken place due to additions and deletions on a large scale”, and “rapid urbanisation and frequent migration of population from one place to another… have become a regular trend”.
Electors who move often “register themselves at another place without getting their names deleted from the electoral roll of the initial place of residence”, which increases chances of “repeated entries” in the rolls. “Thus”, the order said, “the situation warrants an intensive verification drive to verify each person before enrolment as an elector.”
The ECI also underlined its constitutional obligation to ensure that only citizens are enrolled as electors. It said it had decided to conduct a special intensive revision for the whole country “for the discharge of its constitutional mandate to protect the integrity of the electoral rolls”.
During previous special intensive revisions, Block Level Officers (BLOs) would go house to house with an “enumeration pad” to be filled by the head of a household.
This time around, each existing elector will have to submit an individual enumeration form. Those added to the roll after January 1, 2003 — the year of the last intensive revision — will additionally have to provide proof of citizenship. (Those already on the electoral roll before the cut-off date would be presumed to be citizens, unless Electoral Registration Officers receive any input to the contrary).
The ECI’s Form 6, which registers new electors, requires applicants to simply sign a declaration that they are citizens, and not furnish documentation proving the fact (only age and address proofs are needed). The ECI has added a new declaration form requiring proof of citizenship for the exercise in Bihar.
Apart from documents such as passport, birth certificate, SC/ST certificate, an extract of one’s parents’ name in the electoral roll of Bihar as of January 1, 2003 “will be considered as a sufficient document in itself”, the ECI order states.
While the ECI is yet to provide an exact number of electors who will be required to furnish proof of citizenship, roughly 3 crore electors have been added to electoral rolls since 2003.
According to the ECI, starting on Wednesday till July 26, BLOs will be required to visit every household with existing electors to get pre-filled forms signed and collect additional documentation if needed. BLOs will be making at least three attempts per household, the ECI said. Electors will also have the option of downloading their forms from the ECI’s website or ECINET app, and submitting them online.
Electors whose enumeration forms are not received by July 25 will be deleted from the roll. Deletions can be contested from August 1 to September 1.
The Opposition has expressed concerns about the exercise potentially disenfranchising electors. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday called the move “more dangerous than NRC [National Register of Citizens]” and alleged that her state, which heads to polls next year, was the real “target”.
The Congress said that the ECI was admitting that “all is not well with India’s electoral rolls” but called the revision “a cure worse than the disease”.
