Bihar SIR: Supreme Court asks Election Commission to be transparent about electoral roll

The Supreme Court on Tuesday reminded the Election Commission of India that “the degree of transparency and access to information form the hallmarks of an open democracy” while questioning the top poll body about the individual details of voters added to the final electoral roll in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll of Bihar. Over 21.5 lakh voters have been added in the final roll and 3.66 lakh removed. Voter clarity “There is confusion about the names added on in the final list… What is the identity of the people added on? Is it an add-on of names taken from the 65 lakh voters deleted in the draft roll, or are they new and independent names? The final list shows an appreciation of the number of voters… This exercise we want you to do is in aid of the electoral process, to maintain intact the faith in the electoral process,” Justice Joymalya Bagchi, who was part of the Bench headed by Justice Surya Kant, asked the Election Commission (EC). The final list shows the total tally of eligible voters in the State as 7.42 crore. This was an improvement in numbers from 7.24 crore voters listed in the draft electoral roll, with 65 lakh removed. Bihar had 7.89 crore voters as on June 24, 2025 — the date of notification of the SIR exercise. The court further asked the EC if the 3.66 lakh voters, deleted from the final list, were individually informed through a formal order of deletion to facilitate the filing of appeals against the exclusion. “They have a right to appeal,” Justice Kant addressed the EC. The Bench, again, queried if a separate list of names and details of the 3.66 lakh excluded voters was published and made easily accessible at the grassroots level. The court posted the case on Thursday. Justice Bagchi referred to Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors’ Rules, 1960, which required poll authorities to display the names and details of deleted voters on the notice boards of district electoral offices. Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, for the EC, said the disaggregated data was still being collected from ground-level officers and processed. However, there has not been a single complaint against any exclusion of names in the final list. He said the final electoral roll has already been shared with the political parties. “Who is deleted and who is not requires only a basic comparison between the draft roll and the final list,” Dwivedi argued. Justice Kant, at one point in the hearing, threw the EC’s line of argument at the petitioners’ lawyers, advocates Prashant Bhushan and Neha Rathi. “Bhushan, but where are the aggrieved people? The draft voter list is available on the EC website; the final voter list is also available. You could compare and identify the excluded names. Show us specific cases in the 3.66 lakh deleted voters whose names were deleted without any communication… This cannot be a roving enquiry… For whom are you doing this? They may be illegals who were deleted from the voter list, would they come out and complain?” Justice Kant asked them. Bhushan said the SIR, instead of cleaning up the electoral process, have only compounded the problems by EC’s opacity. The court asked the EC to address the issues raised in Bhushan’s written submissions on Thursday. These submissions contended that though the official estimate of adult population in Bihar for September 2025 was 8.22 crore, the number of electors in the final rolls was only 7.42 crore. “Thus, 80 lakh, that is, approximately 10 per cent of the total adult population of Bihar, has been denied their right to vote. Such a sharp fall in the adult population to the electors’ ratio is a record for India and for Bihar,” the written submissions said. In no State of the country previously have as many as 10 per cent of the electorate been excluded from the electoral roll, Bhushan said. Further, Bhushan submitted that lakhs of women were ‘missing’ from Bihar’s electoral rolls. “After SIR, while Bihar’s gender ratio is 934 in September 2025, the gender ratio in the final electoral rolls has fallen sharply to 892. This translates into 17 lakh missing women… SIR has wiped out a whole decade’s gains in the gender ratio of electoral rolls,” the submissions presented in court. The SIR exercise has also resulted in disproportionate exclusion of Muslims, Bhushan claimed. “Our analysis based on name recognition software shows that Muslims were 25 per cent among the 65 lakh voters excluded from the draft rolls and 34 per cent among the 3.66 lakh deleted electors from the final rolls… This disproportionate exclusion accounts for the reduction of about 6 lakh Muslim voters,” he submitted. The court asked the EC to respond to Mr. Bhushan’s analysis that at least 5.17 lakh names on the final rolls appear to the duplicates. “There are over 2.5 lakh cases of blank or junk household numbers, over 25000 electors with gibberish names and nearly 60000 entries with invalid gender or relation or gender relations mismatch,” the written submissions alleged. Published on October 7, 2025