Telangana SIR puts over 73 lakh voter entries at risk of exclusion from draft roll

The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Telangana has brought more than 73 lakh voter entries into the “uncollectable” category, with Hyderabad facing the sharpest potential reduction in its electorate.

Hyderabad recorded the lowest rate of digitisation among Telangana’s districts. According to the status report released by the office of the Telangana Chief Electoral Officer, enumeration forms for 27,89,214 of the city’s 47,36,669 registered electors had been digitised by the Aug 10 deadline.

That leaves more than 41% of the city’s existing voter entries without digitised enumeration forms at this stage. The situation is part of a larger statewide exercise.

Telangana has 3.38 crore electors covered by the SIR. Forms for 2.64 crore voters, or 78.30%, had been digitised, while 73,39,234 forms, accounting for 21.70% of the electorate, remained undigitised and were classified as “uncollectable”.

The uncollectable category is not made up solely of voters who could not be traced. The official breakup cited in the reports shows that 45.18 lakh entries relate to voters who had permanently shifted, while 11.25 lakh were classified as absent or untraceable.

Another 9.22 lakh were marked as deceased and 6.70 lakh were identified as already enrolled. A further 1.02 lakh entries were placed under an “others” category.

This distinction is important because the current figures do not represent a final deletion of 73 lakh voters. The entries are at risk of being left out of the draft electoral roll because their enumeration forms have not been digitised.

The next stage provides an opportunity for affected voters to establish their eligibility and seek inclusion.

The draft electoral rolls are scheduled to be published on August 17. Claims and objections can then be submitted until September 16, while the process of serving notices and disposing of claims and objections is scheduled to continue until October 15. The final electoral rolls are expected to be published on October 19.

Hyderabad stands out because of the scale of the potential change. Based on the August 10 status report, the city could see its electoral roll shrink by more than 41% if the undigitised entries are ultimately excluded. Medchal-Malkajgiri and Ranga Reddy could also see substantial reductions, with the corresponding figures exceeding 36% and 34% respectively, according to the district-wise data cited by Siasat.

The high proportion of uncollectable entries in Hyderabad has been attributed in the reports to several factors, including voters having shifted from their registered addresses, difficulty tracing electors, lack of awareness and the monsoon conditions during the enumeration exercise.

At the state level, the largest category among the uncollectable forms is that of voters reported to have permanently shifted. This accounts for more than 45 lakh entries, substantially more than those classified as deceased or absent. The data therefore points primarily to questions around voter migration and the ability of the enumeration exercise to establish the current status of electors.

The revision is now moving from enumeration to verification. The eventual size of Telangana’s electorate will depend on how many of the entries currently outside the digitised database are subsequently restored through the claims and objections process.

For Hyderabad in particular, the Aug 17 draft roll will provide the first clearer indication of how much the voter list has actually changed. Until then, the more than 19 lakh undigitised entries in the city should be understood as potentially excluded entries rather than confirmed deletions.