The ongoing exercise of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has raised serious concerns about the potential disenfranchisement of large numbers of citizens. In many instances, people are being asked to produce retrospective documents to establish their citizenship—documents that many genuine citizens are unable to provide. The challenge before policymakers is to identify prospective […]
SIR to be rejected: Civilisational tradition of this land to be respected
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is likely to start in several more States anytime soon. Citizens’ movements in these States need to demand a stop to the SIR and ask for measures that will ensure that no genuine voter is excluded. The experience of States where SIR has been conducted have thrown up the […]
India needs a door-to-door enumeration, not the SIR
The advantage of a fresh exercise is that it will not replicate the existing errors in the rolls and prevent inclusion and exclusion errors happening on a massive scale through the SIR It is a welcome measure that the Karnataka Cabinet has decided to ask the state Law Department to study the proposed Special Intensive […]
The way forward for determining citizenship
As there is no satisfactory means of proving a voter’s citizenship retrospectively, identify a prospective exercise to ensure that no genuine citizen gets excluded from the electoral roll or citizenship Not only civil society organisations even officialdom is now openly resisting the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. An assistant electoral registration officer in […]
Mumbai civic poll is latest theatre of freebie politics
Cash transfers fundamentally alter the relationship between the state and the voter. They create a one-way flow — the government gives, the citizen receives. Gratitude begins to substitute accountability. After years of delay, Mumbai is finally headed for a municipal election. For nearly half a decade, India’s richest city has been governed not by elected […]
Political funding in India is neither fair nor transparent
– An article by Maj Gen Anil Verma (Retd) (Head of ADR) and Ms Shelly Mahajan (Program and Research Manager (Political Party Watch) at ADR) There is a need for intervention to ensure healthy electoral competition and to diversify the sources of political funding. Otherwise, it is always the citizens at large who end up […]
Ajit Ranade: Cash handouts are politically popular but what do they imply for inflation, welfare and fiscal health?
Bihar’s pre-poll handouts were part of a political pattern in India. So what do cash transfers mean for price stability, welfare outcomes and fiscal management? Conditional cash transfers are found to work, but a universal basic income (UBI) deserves consideration too. What happens when a helicopter drops a large amount of cash on a local […]
India’s sunshine law: Clouded by the data privacy bill
Opinion: The SIR in Bihar was a futile bureaucratic exercise
If only a mere 0.1% residents are likely to be undocumented immigrants, as evidenced in Bihar, is there any logic in this retrospective SIR exercise being conducted country-wide and harassing 96.88 crore citizens, asks the author. A tsunami of allegations and counter-allegations has erupted in the mess involving the final electoral rolls in Bihar after […]
When the Election Commission becomes a threat to democracy
Once a constitutional safeguard, the ECI now risks enabling the erosion of India’s democratic norms through partisanship and opacity. The Election Commission of India (ECI) was set up on January 25, 1950, one day before the country became a Republic. So, historically, the ECI predates the Republic of India, which is an important factoid that […]