NEW DELHI, Nov 17: The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Monday announced a special revision of electoral rolls in Assam where Assembly polls are scheduled to be held next year.
The poll body is notably not conducting Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Assam, as in other states, pending status of the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The 2019 NRC list in Assam had excluded nearly 19.6 lakh persons from the list of 3.3 crore applicants, but no final notification has followed till date. The Assam government has challenged the NRC in its current form in the Supreme Court.
While announcing the second phase of the national SIR on October 27, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had said: “Under the Citizenship Act, there are separate provisions for citizenship in Assam. Under the supervision of the Supreme Court, the exercise of checking citizenship is about to be completed. The June 24 SIR order was for the entire country. Under such circumstances, this would not have applied to Assam.”
The special revision of voter lists in Assam though will have heightened scrutiny as compared to the routine annual special summary revision (SSR), according to a senior EC official. Under this, Booth Level Officers (BLOs) will do house-to-house checks but voters would not have to fill any enumeration forms as in the SIR.
Instead the BLOs would carry three forms, named Statement 1-3, according to the EC order sent to the Assam Chief Electoral Officer on Monday. The Statement -1 would be a pre-filled register to be carried by the BLOs containing the details of existing electors in their respective part. The household will be the basic unit for conducting the house-to-house survey and to get the said details verified and corrected from the electors.
The details of D Voters or “Doubtful” voters shall be carried forward without any change and any modification, including deletion or removal, shall be made upon receiving of an order from the Foreigners Tribunal or a court of law.
The BLOs would in ‘Statement–2’ make entries of un-enrolled eligible citizens in and in ‘Statement-3’ of prospective electors who are more than 17 years of age and will be eligible for enrolment in the four quarters of 2026.
January 1, 2026 will be the qualifying date for the State to carry out the special revision. According to the schedule, the door-to-door verification will take place from November 22 to December 20. The integrated draft electoral roll will be published on December 27 and the final roll on February 10 next year.
Amid accusations by Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi over large number of voters having house number marked as zero and illegible photos on rolls, specific instructions have also been given to ensure that houses with no numbers allotted should be given a “non-zero” notional number like ‘N1’ and so on besides replacing blurred, poor quality and “non-human” images from the rolls.
The EC had last month ordered SIR for Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Puducherry, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Lakshadweep in the second phase. The first phase had been carried out in Bihar which had led to the removal of nearly 69 lakh names from the voter lists.
(Manas Dasgupta)
