Beyond ‘Special’: How the 2025 Bihar SIR marks a break from the past

In June last year, five months before assembly elections in Bihar, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls for the state: voters whose names could be traced back to the 2003 rolls could submit an enumeration form; others would additionally have to produce one of 11 prescribed identity documents. 

The ECI cited the following justifications: rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, non-reporting of deaths and the need to weed out “illegal immigrants”. For the electorate, the revision kindled anxieties about mass disenfranchisement, accompanied as it was by a reverse burden of proof. This diverged from settled law, as was formulated in Lal Babu Hussein v Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) (1995), where the State had relied on previous electoral rolls to presume that citizens had remained enfranchised. 

In July 2025, petitioners, including Association for Democratic Reforms and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties mounted a constitutional challenge to the SIR in the Supreme Court. A two-judge Bench heard the matter for 29 days before reserving judgement. It issued certain directions but turned down the request of the petitioners to stay the process. By this time, the Bihar elections were done and dusted, with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led alliance registering a dominant win. 

The SIR process—now unfolding nationwide—has become a contest between the ECI’s constitutional and statutory autonomy and the right to vote under Article 326. Yet, electoral roll revision in India has a long and contested history. Intensive revisions, citizenship anxieties and even hurried timelines are not unprecedented. What distinguishes the present SIR is its departure from the presumption in favour of inclusion and continuity. 

What is a ‘special’ revision?

If electoral roll revision is meant to be routine, what does it mean for a revision to be described as “special”? Rule 25 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 provides that rolls may be revised either intensively or summarily, or partly by each method. Section 21(3) of The Representation of the People Act, 1950 refers to a “special revision”. Neither the Rules nor the Act, however, employ the composite phrase “special intensive revision.”

The terms “summary” and “intensive” revision are not statutorily defined. In practice, summary revisions are conducted annually for each constituency, while intensive revisions typically take place once in five years, particularly before the General or State Assembly Elections. Revisions described as “special”—whether summary or intensive—have generally been undertaken to facilitate enrolment of voters in distinct circumstances.

Notably, apart from the June 2025 notification announcing the SIR in Bihar, there appears to be little reference to a “special intensive revision” in the ECI’s own manual, which sets out details about roll revision over several decades. Instead, the manual prefers the term “intensive revision,” as used in Rule 25. 

The ECI has defended the new nomenclature, asserting that it falls within its plenary powers under Article 324. The petitioners have challenged this position. They argue that by invoking Article 324—read with Section 21(3) of the RPA—to justify “special” revisions, the ECI effectively seeks to override existing legislation and depart from rules that prioritise inclusion over deletions. 

The first election and missing women 

Between 1950 and 2004, there were 13 instances of nationwide intensive revision of electoral rolls. The preparation of the first electoral roll before the general election in 1951-52 was the most fraught, given the challenge of enfranchising lakhs of refugees displaced by Partition. The  Constituent Assembly Secretariat deemed it appropriate to include the refugee population on the basis of “anticipatory citizenship”— it said that an “intention of residence” would have to do. In the years after the first General Election, rolls were revised summarily: the aim was to tackle the rolls of one-fifth of a constituency annually until an intensive revision before the next election. 

However, the first electoral roll was marked by significant inaccuracies, particularly around the enrolment of women voters. During the first election, prevailing social norms meant that many women were registered not in their own names, but in relation to their male relatives. Electoral Registration Officers were tasked with persuading such voters to enrol with their proper name. 

Of the 38 lakh voters removed from the rolls in Bihar between January and September 2025, nearly 60 percent were women. While permanent migration following marriage has been cited as one of the primary reasons for disenfranchisement, married women faced hurdles due to the requirement of providing documents related to their maternal household instead of their present residence.

‘Ordinary residence’ and procedural safeguards

Between the second and third General Election, in 1958 and 1960, two amendments to the Representation of the People Act (RPA), led to significant changes. The 1958 amendment clarified that “ordinary residence” did not depend on ownership or possession of a dwelling, and that temporary absence from a constituency would not invalidate it. In a state like Bihar, which records some of the highest out-migration in the country, the verification of ordinary residence assumes particular importance.

Under Section 20(7) of the RPA, the Central Government, in consultation with the ECI, determines a person’s place of ordinary residence where a dispute arises. In Bihar in 2025, questions of ordinary residence determined the revision of rolls. When the draft rolls were published in August, 36 lakh—or 55 percent—of the total 65 lakh excluded voters were categorised as “permanently shifted/not found.” Deleting voters under this ground risks complete disenfranchisement for those who are temporarily residing in other states.  

The ECI conducted nationwide intensive revisions in 1965–66. That year, an amendment to Section 21 of the RPA dispensed with the requirement of annual revisions, instead empowering the ECI to revise rolls even when no election was imminent. Despite this change, the ECI continued annual revisions, a practice that persisted until disruptions in the 1970s.

1971, Assam and beyond 

Echoing last year’s developments in Bihar, the electoral rolls for the 1971 General Election were prepared with alarming haste. Whereas earlier summary revisions stretched across 12 to 18 months, this one concluded in two months. However, the ECI continued to put store by house-to-house enumeration for intensive revisions. 

In 1975, in response to large-scale migration to urban centres, the ECI undertook a de novo preparation of the draft rolls. Unlike the SIR in Bihar, this exercise did not discard earlier summary and intensive revisions; rather, it built on them. Two supplementary lists were prepared: first, of persons eligible to be registered as voters–whose names were not previously included in the draft rolls; and second, of those already listed who were deceased or no longer ordinarily resident. Drawing on prior rolls and house-to-house verification, the Commission finalised the electoral roll ahead of the 1975 General Election.

In Bihar today, petitioners contend that the SIR similarly amounts to a de novo preparation of electoral rolls—but without the safeguards that characterised the 1975 exercise. They argue that this risks effectively invalidating rolls prepared after 2003, including successive special summary revisions that have tracked voter migration over decades.

At the same time, concerns over the integrity of electoral rolls are not new. Through the 1970s, persistent objections surfaced about the fictitious entries and inclusion of “illegal immigrants” in voter lists. These anxieties were particularly intense after 1971, as large-scale migration accompanied the violence and upheaval surrounding the independence of Bangladesh.

In 1979, demands to verify citizenship and remove “illegal immigrants” became the rallying point for the boycott of the 1980 Assembly elections in Assam. Despite mounting pressure, the ECI took a firm position, stating in a press release that no person whose name was already included in the rolls would be deleted on the ground of citizenship, given the time-consuming nature of such determinations. 

In response to escalating unrest, Parliament enacted the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983, partly to facilitate the preparation of electoral rolls in Assam. The Commission also issued clear directions: names carried forward in successive rolls were not to be deleted unless citizenship had been formally determined by the competent authority, as the responsibility for such verification lay not with the ECI but with the “prescribed authority”.

Following the 61st Constitutional Amendment, the age of enfranchisement was lowered from 21 to 18 years. In 1989, a Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls was undertaken to include newly eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 21. The ECI conducted a “special revision” based on house-to-house verification to include eligible voters who were not previously on the rolls. This was, perhaps, the first-ever large-scale exercise of its kind undertaken by the ECI in its history.

A shift in approach

Fast forward to the 1990s, when the emphasis shifted to improving accuracy through structural reform. The digitisation of electoral rolls and the introduction of Electors’ Photo Identity Cards (EPIC) reduced reliance on intensive pre-election revisions. After the comprehensive revision of 1993, only summary revisions were conducted until the special revision of 2003—signalling a departure from the earlier view that intensive revisions were needed before every election.

In marked contrast to the 2025 Bihar SIR, earlier revisions operated on a presumption in favour of preserving the sanctity of the electoral roll. The burden lay on the objector, not the voter. Deletions were permitted only upon the production of positive documentary proof from the competent authority on questions of citizenship, and never without affording the affected elector a fair hearing.

In an era defined by digitisation, the expectation would have been incremental refinement of roll revision processes. But the latest SIR charts a different course: it shifts the burden of proof onto electors, dispenses with prior house-to-house verification, compresses the window for appeal and proceeds with a de novo exercise that sidelines prior rolls. All this lends an ironic edge to the ECI’s motto of “No voter to be left behind.”

(Sudhiksha Innanje, intern at the Supreme Court Observer, provided research support for this article)