West Bengal’s Voter Roll Crisis is a Demographic Crisis
A Nobel Laureate and recipient of the Bharat Ratna, he has authored more than a dozen books and countless academic as well as popular articles. Adjectives fall short in capturing the true magnitude of his achievements. Yet, Amartya Sen had to appear for a hearing under the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) on January 16, 2026. Since he is currently abroad, his family furnished all his credentials.
The reason cited was that the recorded age difference between him and his parents appeared to be less than 15 years, which was flagged as irregular during the SIR process. The papers were perfect, the electoral roll revision is marked with some system induced flaws.
This incident is remarkable not merely because it involves a renowned economist, but also because it illustrates how easily administrative logic can misinterpret demographic history. If someone like Amartya Sen too can be subjected to such excessive scrutiny, one can only imagine the ordeal faced by countless ordinary individuals navigating the SIR process over the past month.
This is not merely confined to professor Sen, it is about how older family patterns in West Bengal are being ignored. Early marriage, many children and closely spaced births meant small age gaps between parents and children were common in earlier generations. The present SIR exercise appears to rely heavily on administrative assumptions than on demographic understanding, making it look like a logical discrepancy.
The current exercise assumes smaller families, wider gaps between generations, stable documentation and digitally legible documents. When a single administrative framework tries to govern both, demographic legacy begins to look like demographic error.
Changing household size in West Bengal, NFHS-1 (1992-93) and NFHS-5 (2019-21)
Source: Author’s calculation from NFHS household files
Recent estimates from the Sample Registration System (SRS) show that West Bengal’s total fertility rate has fallen to around 1.3, far below the replacement level of 2.1. It shows that population growth has slowed down: fewer young people are entering adulthood, and the electorate is gradually growing older.
This transition is also visible inside households themselves. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data show that in the early 1990s, nearly two-thirds of households had five or more members. Today, that share has fallen to about 44%, whereas one- and two-member households have almost doubled, signalling a shift in the demographic life toward smaller families and shrinking household size.
The SIR, as a result, has exposed a deeper mismatch between electoral procedures and the state’s changing demographic realities.
The removal of 58 lakh names from the state’s draft electoral rolls reduces the voter base to roughly 7.08 crore, triggering confusion and fear across the state. Further, those whose names are already there have been called for scrutiny on the account of so-called and manufactured ‘logical discrepancies’, raising anxieties and reportedly causing untimely deaths. Further, the death toll of block level officers (BLOs), who have been under tremendous pressure during the SIR process, has been high in West Bengal.
The NFHS-5 (2019-21) shows that fertility decline varies across social and religious groups. While differences remain in religious groups, the gap has narrowed sharply over the past three decades.
In West Bengal today, fertility among Hindu women has fallen to about 1.47 children per woman, while among Muslim women it is around 2.03. Three decades ago, the overall fertility average in the state was close to three children per woman, showing how sharply reproduction has slowed across all communities. What stands out now is not the widening difference, but convergence.
West Bengal’s population growth has slowed down much faster than the national average, and projections suggest a further decline in future. In such settings, deletions from voter rolls are no longer technical events. In high-fertility states, large numbers of new voters enter adulthood every year, so the removals are partly absorbed by new additions.
In a low-fertility state like West Bengal, that condition no longer exists. Fewer young voters are coming in, while the existing electorate is aging. As a result, even small errors or exclusions in the rolls have a much larger impact. Every deletion carries not just administrative consequences, but real demographic and democratic weight.
At the same time, West Bengal now increasingly depends on migration to sustain its workforce. Census 2011 shows that around 16.5 lakh workers from the state had migrated to other parts of the country in search of employment, and recent administrative records suggest that over 22 lakh Bengali workers are employed outside the state. Labour gaps in agriculture, construction and urban services are filled by internal migrants from other states and, in border districts, by cross-border movement shaped by economic and environmental pressures.
While migration stabilises everyday economic activity, it complicates documentation. Circular migrants are often absent during verification visits. Informal housing rarely matches official address records. Name spellings, surnames and family linkages vary across regions.
These are normal features of a mobile labour economy, not indicators of illegitimacy. Yet during the SIR process, they were frequently treated as grounds for suspicion.
An analysis by the Sabar Institute complicates dominant political narratives around SIR. Their constituency-level findings suggest that the pattern of unmapped voters does not uniformly align with claims of religious targeting. In several Muslim-majority areas, the proportion of unmapped voters appears lower than the state average, while constituencies with high concentrations of migrant or refugee-origin Hindu populations, like the Mathua community, show higher rates of exclusion.
In some parts of Kolkata, surname patterns suggest a significant share of deletions involving the internal migrants, particularly non-speaking Bengali from neighbouring states. These findings do not deny the hardship experienced by individuals affected by the SIR. However, they challenge the idea that the SIR can be understood only through a communal lens. What emerges instead is a picture of administrative fragility in the face of demographic complexity.
The SIR process heavily relies on database matching, physical verification and algorithmic flagging. But the system assumes that stable households, consistent addresses and readily available documentation are increasingly misaligned with West Bengal’s demographic structure. Elderly voters, particularly women living alone, often lack updated documents or mobility. Migrant workers may be away during verification visits. Informal settlements rarely conform to official records.
In these contexts, absence is easily interpreted as non-existence. SIR has also created widespread panic. Newspaper reports abound with the picture of plights, like of the elderly citizen, Muktibala Pramanik, a 90-year-old bedridden grandmother from Katwa in East Burdwan, who was being carried to offices, only to sign documents.
It was only later, after public backlash, that the Election Commission decided to allow home verification for very elderly and disabled voters. Even without questioning intent, the outcome is very clear that verification processes fall heaviest on the most vulnerable populations, which weakens democratic inclusion.
India’s electoral administrations were shaped at a time when the population was growing, expanding, when households were relatively stable and young voters plentiful. West Bengal has gone beyond that phase and is now characterised by low fertility, ageing and high mobility. In such settings, administrative neutrality is not enough. Electoral systems need to be consciously redesigned to accommodate demographic transition.
Roni Sikdar is an independent researcher.
This article went live on January twenty-fourth, two thousand twenty six, at thirty-five minutes past twelve at noon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
