The recent judgment of the Supreme Court justifying the validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the case of Bihar and giving a clean chit to it appear to be deeply flawed. The controversy has been mostly restricted to debates about the resulting disenfranchisement of lakhs or crores of citizens and the manner of […]
SIR
Fresh citizenship framework suggested amidst electoral roll concerns
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]