Pleas challenging SIR of rolls in Bihar | ‘Not enumerator’s job to determine citizenship’: Petitioners cite EC’s 2003 guidelines

In its June 24 order for the SIR, the EC had said that the last intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar was done in 2003 and the rolls of that year were deemed to be probative evidence of citizenship of electors. All those added to the rolls after that were required to submit documents proving their date and/or place of birth, to establish eligibility, including citizenship.

Challenging this, the petitioners submitted that they had accessed the 62-page EC document titled “Electoral Rolls Special Revision of Intensive Nature with Qualifying Date 01.01.2003, Final Guidelines”, which showed that the 2003 exercise was “fundamentally different” from the SIR.

“Therefore the IR of 2003 cannot be used as a precedent for the SIR. Nor does it provide any basis for 2003 to be treated as probative evidence of citizenship. The respondent has indulged in a mala fide exercise to mislead this Hon’ble Court by deliberately concealing crucial and relevant information while offering an untruthful account,” they said.

As per the guidelines, enumerators, who are now called Booth Level Officers, were tasked with going house-to-house to enter the names of eligible electors in 2003. In the SIR, the BLOs were required to go house-to-house and provide a new enumeration form to the electors to submit to remain on the rolls, something which was not the case in 2003. At that time the enumerator used to fill out the details of the members of a household on a “record of enumeration” signed by the head of the household.

In 2003, all electors were not required to submit documents, but enumerators could ask for proof in case of a family shifting to a locality from another part of the country or if they had a doubt about age or ordinary residence.

One of the reasons given by the EC for conducting the SIR was the inclusion of foreign nationals on the rolls over the years. As per Article 326, only Indian citizens above the age of 18 years can be electors. In 2003, however, the intensive revision guidelines made it clear that it was not an exercise to check citizenship.

“It is clarified that it is not the job of the enumerator to determine the citizenship of an individual. However, they have the power and responsibility to exclude any person on the basis of the qualification for registration regarding age or ordinary residence,” the guidelines said.

The petitioners also submitted findings of a preliminary analysis of the Bihar electoral rolls after SIR, in which 68.66 lakh names were deleted and 21.53 lakh added, taking the total from 7.89 crore to 7.42 crore. They said while Bihar’s adult population was estimated to be 8.22 crore in 2025, the number of electors was 7.42 crore, meaning that 10% of the adult population was not registered to vote.

The gender ratio of electors had gone down from 932 females to 1,000 males in the electoral roll as of January 2025 to 892 after SIR. This, they said, “translates to 17 lakh missing women”. Using name recognition software, they said the analysis showed that while Muslims made up about 17% of the population of Bihar, they accounted for 25% of the names deleted at the draft stage and 34% of the deletions in the final roll published on September 30. They added that by analysing the objections filed during the SIR, they found that 56% of the objections were filed by the electors themselves. “Strangely, 779 electors had objected to their own name on the ground that they are ‘not citizens of India’. It showed that either they had not filled their own enumeration form or the objection or both,” they said.

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