The ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) has created nationwide anxiety among voters and booth-level officers (BLOs). The legacy SIR rolls that form the foundation of SIR 2.0 remain largely non-digital, non-searchable, incomplete, and prone to errors. With little real preparedness by the Election Commission of India (ECI), the hybrid process – requiring both physical enumeration forms and their digitisation – has only deepened confusion, increasing stress on voters and overburdening BLOs. 

Although this long-awaited SIR is intended to update, clean, and strengthen the voter database, it has instead become controversial due to procedural ambiguities and its dependence on outdated, cumbersome practices rather than modern digital tools. The EC’s digital infrastructure, ECINet remains underutilised as SIR 2.0 continues to rely on manual, repetitive, and non-verifiable procedures governed by flawed SOPs. 

Current EPICs: No Issues

The first part of the enumeration form captures the voter’s basic information – name, address, and current EPIC number – exactly as printed on the EPIC card. If any correction is needed, including a change of residence that shifts the constituency or even the state, the voter can file Form 8. The standard operation procedures for this section are transparent, efficient, and fully supported by ECINet. With an Aadhaar card, a voter can complete all these tasks online.

Aadhaar linkage and verification also work seamlessly online, although there are issues of inconsistency. The same applies to new voters, who can be added via Form 6. So far, the ECI’s technology team and the robust backbone provided by C-DAC, Pune, appear successful.

The second part of the enumeration form seeks additional details such as the voter’s date of birth, Aadhaar number, mobile number, and the names and current EPIC numbers of their parents and spouse. Here, too, there is no difficulty: the EPIC numbers of family members are easily retrievable through ECINet’s powerful and user-friendly search engine.

ECINet – housing records of nearly one billion voters – is among the best electoral digital infrastructures in the world. It can detect duplicates, flag inconsistencies, and assist in corrections through automated and manual verification modes. 

Non-searchable past SIR details

Yet, shockingly, the same ECINet does not work for the much smaller set of a little over 600 million voters of the SIR 2002-03. The enumeration forms require voters to extract their own, and/or their parents’ or grandparents’ past electoral details from these old rolls. Unlike current data, where serial numbers, part numbers, and polling booths auto-populate, voters are expected to recall two-decade-old, one-time details with precision, and also for relatives who may no longer be alive.

Instead of enabling ECINet for historical records, the ECI offers only a superficial search tool that mostly returns “no details found” and instructs voters to scan PDFs or contact BLOs manually. The search page carries a disclaimer stating that the 2002/2003 rolls are published exactly as received from state CEOs, who prepare and revise the rolls, and that the ECI merely hosts them without modification, effectively distancing itself from the very officers it supervises.  

The result is severe: voters must manually sift through tens or even hundreds of thousands of PDF pages to locate their names – a Herculean and often impossible task. Even after such exhaustive efforts, many searches end in a complete null result, with no records found for individuals who have been Indian residents since birth. The author himself, after several days of manually scanning hundreds of thousands of entries in Hindi, English, and Bengali, was unable to locate his own records, despite having voted in every general election. The experience is the same for hundreds of his colleagues – tech-savvy, long-standing Indian residents by birth – who could not find their own names or those of their relatives in the 2002/2003 SIR rolls.

A primary reason for missing names is voter mobility. Many people moved homes – some for long-term work, others for short-term or seasonal jobs, and many continued to move back and forth in a circular migration pattern. Their details were ignored, misplaced, or not accurately recorded. Some permanent residents also find their names missing from the records. Such gaps and other inconsistencies highlight the unreliability of these old legacy rolls as the foundation for the SIR.

Paradoxically, such incomplete SIR rolls from two decades ago are now being used as the foundation for today’s SIR, leaving countless genuine voters unable to find their names anywhere.

Systemic breakdown of SIR

The ECI’s core assumption that every voter, regardless of age, mobility, or profession, can accurately recall where they voted in the 2002-04 elections is fundamentally unsound. At that time, EPIC cards were not reliably archived, and voters often relied on small paper slips distributed by political parties. These records no longer exist. The problem is magnified for voters who have relocated multiple times over the past two decades.

BLOs offer little assistance: they mainly collect and distribute forms and have neither access to readily available past SIR data nor the training to interpret it. With no records to fill in the enumeration forms from the past SIR, many BLOs have been requesting birth certificates and additional address proofs, beyond Aadhaar, which directly contradicts the ECI’s instructions that no document is required for enumeration forms. Many BLOs lack experience in data entry, resulting in forms being piled up without digitisation. It has resulted in Uttar Pradesh distributing 99% of enumeration forms while digitising less than 10% as per the EC’s press release on November 21, 2025. There are even reports of overburdened BLOs driven to illness and death.

The requirement to paste photographs on paper enumeration forms adds another layer of burden, forcing poor voters to spend on photos and requiring BLOs and data-entry operators to digitise them – an unnecessary, painful, error-prone, and avoidable step.

In 2025–26, there is simply no justification for flawed, outdated SOPs. These structurally unsound procedures expose a system lacking basic preparedness, adequate planning, and effective execution. Voters are left confused and anxious, while BLOs are burdened without meaningful support.

A nationwide SIR, covering nearly a billion people, must be designed to ensure voter comfort and be staffed with personnel who possess genuine digital skills to address citizens’ concerns. The SIR must guarantee consistency, verification, integrity, and robustness rather than anxiety and uncertainty.

Rajeev Kumar is a former professor of computer science at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and JNU, and a former scientist at DRDO and DST.

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