Overview
- The draft Special Intensive Revision (SIR) roll in Telangana placed 73.39 lakh entries — 21.7% of the pre-SIR register — in Absent/Shifted/Dead/Duplicate categories and produced about 60.50 lakh anomaly notices and 32.36 lakh unmapped notices, totaling roughly 92.86 lakh electors who must respond.
- Deletions are concentrated in cities: Hyderabad and adjoining assembly constituencies recorded the highest rates with some seats showing deletions above 40% and Musheerabad at 45.2%, reflecting heavy migration and transient tenancies in urban wards.
- Electoral officials and BLOs report operational faults in the ECI mobile app and incomplete uploads of 2002 SIR reference details, while the app rejected minor name mismatches, which together generated millions of ‘unmapped’ notices for voters who had supplied reference data.
- Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy formally asked the Election Commission for a four-week extension to the claims and objections window and proposed helpdesks, wider acceptable documents and decentralised hearings; the Telangana CEO has directed in-person seven-day notice delivery, acknowledgements and sharing of anomaly lists with parties.
- If not fixed, the process risks disenfranchising migrants, daily-wage workers and people with short-term tenancies, and Telangana’s problems are being watched as SIR continues in other states with similar urban deletion patterns and possible moves to link birth/death registries to voter records.