Ahmedabad : Special intensive revision (SIR) exercise in Gujarat has thrown up more than 40 lakh voters who were found to have `permanently shifted’ from the address listed in the existing electoral rolls. Almost half of these were in Ahmedabad and Surat districts. The draft voter list will be published by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Dec 19. If a voter’s name does not appear in the draft list, there is no need to panic. Voters will be given one month, until January 18, 2026, to submit claims or objections regarding inclusion, deletion or correction of details.
Permanently relocated voters account for 54% of these voters. Ahmedabad and Surat have the highest 8.65 lakh and 8.62 lakh ‘permanently shifted’ voters respectively. This collectively accounts for 43% of the total voters in this category. Officials involved in SIR say that reverse migration from Ahmedabad, Surat and other districts with high industrialisation and resultantly more migrant worker population could be a major factor for such high numbers of `permanently shifted’ voters.
Ahmedabad collector Sujith Kumar, also the district election officer, said that while the SIR exercise has revealed that the highest migration has been out of Ahmedabad district, this occurrence can be because of a variety of factors. At the moment, we cannot ascertain whether this migration has been within constituencies of the state or out of the state, he said.
The other top districts from which voters have permanently shifted include Vadodara, Rajkot, Valsad, Kutch, Bhavnagar, Gandhinagar, Banaskantha and Mehsana. Significantly, these districts have higher industrialization – both large industries and MSMEs – and migrant workforce is higher in these districts as compared to others. Assembly constituency wise, the highest outward movement of voters has also been from Ahmedabad and Surat cities. All top ten constituencies from where outward migration has taken place are either from Ahmedabad or Surat.
According to data available from the office of the chief electoral officer (CEO), Choryasi, Kamrej, Limbayat, Udhna, Amraiwadi, Vejalpur, Varachha Road, Olpad, Katargam and Ghatlodia bring up the top ten assembly constituencies from where outward migration has taken place. It needs mention that a Mahatma Gandhi Labour Institute (MGLI) study in 2020 had flagged the issue of reverse migration during the pandemic. It highlighted that 14.97 lakh migrant workers had returned back to their home states during the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the highest outward migration of workers was from Surat and Ahmedabad. When BLOs asked neighbours about the whereabouts of permanently shifted voters, they were told that a majority of the workers from other states who left for their hometowns during the Covid-19 pandemic have not returned to the addresses on their voter cards,” said an official of the Ahmedabad collectorate.
Commenting on the outward migration figures of the ongoing SIR, state chief electoral officer Hareet Shukla, said, “There is also a possibility that relocated voters have shifted to a new address within the constituency or between constituencies of the state and have not modified their EPIC. Interestingly, the electorate swelled by 49 lakh votes between the 2017 and 2022 assembly elections in Gujarat.
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