New Delhi: In late June 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) launched a “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) of Bihar’s electoral rolls – an exercise that spanned roughly three months and covered nearly eight crore registered voters. The ECI’s June 24 order noted that rapid urbanisation/frequent migration may have inflated the roll, prompting a “special revision” for the entire country – starting with Bihar.

The timing, however, was conspicuous – the state heads to polls in November 2025, and such revisions are usually carried out a year or two in advance, not mere months before an election. The previous summary revision had concluded in January 2025 after beginning in October 2024. Yet, within six months, the ECI announced an entirely new revision process.

The commission described this as a “purification” of the rolls. But with a timeline of just three months for what is traditionally a multi-step, labour-intensive exercise, scepticism was inevitable. 

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The official press release shows the electorate shrank from 7.89 crore in June 2025 to about 7.42 crore in September 2025 – a net drop of roughly 47 lakh voters. According to ECI’s own bulletin, about 65 lakh names were struck from the draft roll, another 3.66 lakh removed in the final list, and only 21.5 lakh additions made to end up at about 7.42 crore.

Based on official population projections, Bihar should have around 8.22 crore adult voters in 2025; the new figures suggest nearly 10% of adults have been left out. In essence, the SIR has disenfranchised close to 7% of the state’s adult population in one sweep.

Gendered patterns in voter deletions

In Bihar, democracy has long worn a distinctly feminine face. In the 2020 assembly elections, women’s turnout was 59.7%, while men’s was 54.6% – marking the third election in a row where female turnout exceeded male turnout in the state. In the same election, women outpolled men in 167 out of 243 constituencies.

This pattern extends beyond state polls. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar as well, women pulled ahead: their turnout being around 59.45%, compared to men at about 53%. The trend of women leading in electoral participation is not a fluke but a structural feature of Bihar’s recent politics. Against this backdrop, the SIR’s disproportionate removal of women from the rolls doesn’t merely shrink numbers – it targets the very group that has historically turned out with strength, frequently swung margins, and shaped agendas.

Even before the revision, Bihar’s women were underrepresented in its electorate. On Jan 1, 2025, the roll had 914 women per 1,000 men, already below Bihar’s census ratio of 918. After SIR, that slid to just 894:1000. This translates to the fact that women constitute 59.7% of the reduction in the electorate from January 2025 to September 2025, with districts like Gopalganj, Madhubhani and Kishanganj seeing the largest proportion of deleted women electors. 

A large number of deletions were attributed to relocation (16.09 lakh women and 10.4 lakh men men due to death, due to deletion, for failure to fill forms, and due to duplicate entries.), followed by death (11.6 lakh women and 10.6 lakh men), failure to fill enumeration forms (5.2 lakh women and 4.4 lakh men), and duplicate entries (3.7 lakh women and 3.5 lakh)). The numbers are counterintuitive, given that male migration and male mortality rates in Bihar are demonstrably higher.

Why are women more vulnerable?

The roots of this disproportionate exclusion lie in the texture of women’s lives and the structural vulnerabilities that surround documentation.

In Bihar, where the female literacy rate stands at 73.91% compared to 84.91% among men (as per the 2022 Bihar caste-based survey report), access to and control over documentary proof – such as birth certificates, school records, or marriage certificates – remains uneven. According to the ECI’s own handbooks, voter verification during intensive revisions relies heavily on name-matching and proof-of-residence procedures.

However, women’s names in Bihar often change across life stages: upon marriage, many relocate to their husband’s village and adopt his surname or alter the spelling of their given name. Such shifts, when cross-referenced through automated de-duplication algorithms designed to detect “duplicate” entries, create false positives. In the absence of manual verification and gender-sensitive data handling protocols, these algorithms effectively penalise female mobility. 

The SIR, prioritising “cleaning” the rolls over “confirming” genuine voters, created a perfect storm for such errors. Add to that a gendered digital divide due to which fewer women have the literacy or access needed to verify their status or contest deletions, and disenfranchisement becomes systemic rather than accidental.

The political and policy fallout

It is no exaggeration to say that women saved Nitish Kumar in 2020. Where men’s votes swung toward the opposition, women’s overwhelming turnout for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) balanced the scales. But beyond election-day consequences lies something deeper: the erosion of women’s political leverage.

Bihar’s governance in the last two decades offers concrete proof of how women’s numerical strength translated into policy. The Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana (2006), which provided free bicycles to schoolgirls, became a national case study in how targeted interventions can raise school attendance. The reservation of 50% seats for women in local bodies gave them a foothold in grassroots politics. When prohibition was announced in 2016, it was framed as a moral victory for Bihar’s women, who had long demanded relief from domestic violence and alcoholism. Each of these policies emerged from the recognition by political parties that women electors in the state are not to be ignored.

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Now, that bond is starting to fracture. When lakhs of women are deleted from the rolls, even temporarily, their collective voice weakens. Politicians and strategists, armed with micro-level voter data, notice such shifts and recalibrate their agendas. A government that sees fewer women on its voter rolls may feel less pressure to design or defend women-centric programmes.

The disenfranchisement of women, whether by negligence or design, thus carries a twofold cost. It threatens to distort electoral outcomes, and it undermines the moral legitimacy of governance built on the promise of inclusion. In a state where women’s participation has long been its most powerful democratic constant, their disappearance from the rolls marks not merely an administrative failure but a civic regression.

Himanshi Yadav and Madhav Deepak are Delhi-based lawyers.

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