Unlike The Bihar Experience: How The SIR Is Progressing In Uttar Pradesh

The Election Commission of India recently granted Uttar Pradesh a second extension for its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, pushing the deadline to December 26.

The 15-day extension is the longest among the six states that received similar relief. It is not without reason.

The SIR in Uttar Pradesh was originally supposed to be a month-long exercise. It commenced on November 4 and was originally scheduled to conclude on December 4.

The first extension postponed the deadline to December 11.

When even that seemed difficult to meet, the Chief Electoral Officer of Uttar Pradesh, Navdeep Rinwa, requested an additional two-week extension, citing the substantial time required by District Election Officers to re-verify information about deceased, shifted, or absentee voters.

The revised timeline now sets December 31 as the date for publishing the draft electoral list, with the period for receiving claims and objections running from December 31 to January 30. The final publication of the electoral roll will occur on February 28, 2026.

While CEO Rinwa reported that 99.24 per cent of enumeration forms have been digitised, the pending tasks are massive, both in percentage and absolute terms. Only 80.39 per cent of forms have been returned with voter signatures. This leaves approximately 2.91 crore forms, representing 18.85 per cent of the total, yet to be collected.

The largest category among the ‘missing’ forms is that of voters who have permanently shifted from their registered addresses, accounting for 8.22 per cent, or roughly 1.27 crore forms.

Another significant portion involves deceased voters, numbering about 45.95 lakh, or 2.98 per cent of the pending cases.

Additionally, 1.5 per cent, approximately 23.69 lakh voters, are already registered in other locations, while 0.62 per cent, or 9.58 lakh voters, have received forms but not returned them.

The remaining 5.49 per cent, totalling 84.73 lakh voters, are categorised as absent.

These numbers translated into reports of severe work pressure on election officials. In fact, the first extension of the deadline was granted following reports of a Booth Level Officer dying by suicide, allegedly due to stress related to the SIR workload.

The BJP’s trouble

Following a smoothly conducted SIR in Bihar, the BJP was expecting a similar process in Uttar Pradesh as well. The proceedings thus far, however, have been anything but.

A well-conducted SIR in Bihar was followed by a gigantic majority for the BJP and the NDA in the state. Extending that correlation to Uttar Pradesh, will a messed-up SIR lead to the party suffering losses, or even losing power, in the 2027 Assembly polls?

All signals indicate that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is anxious over how the SIR has proceeded so far in the state.

At a December 19 event in Lucknow, where Maharajganj MP Pankaj Chaudhary was appointed state BJP chief, Adityanath told the workers in attendance that around four crore voters are missing and asserted that 90 per cent of them are potential BJP supporters. While the ECI itself says that close to three crore voters are missing from the SIR, it is likely that Yogi Adityanath was also including first-time voters in his calculations.

Yogi reportedly also named specific constituencies where SIR work is supposedly lagging more than in others. Among these were Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak’s Lucknow Cantt constituency, which has high numbers of shifted voters, and Higher Education Minister Yogendra Upadhyay’s Agra South, which has missing voters.

Yogi is not the only one in the state unit of the BJP cracking the proverbial whip. State general secretary Dharampal Singh has also directed all MLAs and MPs to ensure SIR form submission in their regions, with daily monitoring of constituencies that witnessed close contests in 2022. Text messages and personal calls have been sent to party functionaries, warning that those lagging in SIR responsibilities will face consequences.

When BJP national president JP Nadda was in Lucknow recently, reports claimed that he too exhorted party workers to take the SIR seriously.

With approximately three crore forms still pending as the December 26 deadline approaches, some BJP leaders reportedly want another extension. However, the party’s immediate focus remains booth-level mobilisation, with state president Pankaj Chaudhary instructing cadres to set aside other work and concentrate on ensuring legitimate voters are registered and fraudulent entries removed.

Reasons for SIR going slow

Of the ‘missing’ voters in Uttar Pradesh, most are from the urban areas of the state, which have demonstrated strong support for the BJP. The problem for the party lies in the current lethargy or indifference of such voters.

Traditionally, rural Uttar Pradesh has returned higher polling percentages than urban Uttar Pradesh, and the same pattern is being repeated here.

One reason for the apparent indifference among Uttar Pradesh voters towards the SIR could be that the state election is still around 18 months away. In Bihar, this distance was only around two months. Uttar Pradesh voters know, at the back of their minds, that even if they do not register for voting now, they still have close to 15 to 16 months more to do so.

This belief is a potential threat for the BJP. If the party is not able to get voters verified when an actual verification drive is underway, how many voters can it realistically add to the electoral rolls after the SIR has concluded?

However, not all urban voters are ‘missing’. Many simply wish to retain their vote in their respective villages. The reasons for this range from practical to economic, and even political.

Practical: Many urban residents stay on rent in cities but have their own house in the village and wish to be shown as residents of their ‘own’ home.

Economic: Where there is property to be inherited in the village, or where any administrative or legal property-related process is due, people prefer to have their voter IDs show their village address, even as they continue to live in the city. This is driven by the belief that if they are shown as residents of another place, their claim to property in the village might be weakened.

Political: In a few cases, urban residents also wish to return to villages and contest for posts in the Panchayat, Blocks, and Zila Parishads. For this, they opt to vote in their village.

There is yet another reason for ‘missing’ urban voters. This involves people staying in the same city but moving addresses over the years.

While this is a sign of economic and social mobility, it is creating problems for officials tasked with conducting the SIR, as they have to tally voter details associated with the previous address with those of the new one. In many cases, this involves going through voter lists of separate Assembly constituencies.

What adds another layer of complication is the fact that there has been an Assembly-level delimitation in Uttar Pradesh in 2008 since the last SIR in 2003.

This is leaving both Booth Level Officers and voters scrambling to identify the specific list that contains a given voter’s details from the previous SIR. Private citizens and high-ranking bureaucrats alike are reported to be facing this problem.

An exercise of this scale and level of detail was never going to be an easy project in Uttar Pradesh. If it has to be completed within the deadline, the ECI needs the urgency and support of both the people and the political parties.