Mumbai: Maharashtra’s ongoing electoral roll revision has come under scrutiny after more than 2.07 crore voter enumeration forms remained uncollected during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. The figure represents more than one-fifth of the state’s nearly 9.8 crore registered voters, drawing attention to the scale of the verification drive as the draft electoral roll’s publication date approaches.
The Election Commission’s SIR exercise involves door-to-door verification of voters carried out by Booth Level Officers (BLOs). Its purpose is to update the electoral rolls and flag entries that may need verification — including voters who have changed residence, passed away, were unavailable during the verification process, or have duplicate entries on the rolls.
Mumbai, Thane and Pune Account for Nearly Half
The bulk of the uncollected forms are concentrated in Maharashtra’s major urban centres. Thane, Mumbai City, Mumbai Suburban and Pune together account for 94.47 lakh uncollected forms, roughly 45.4 per cent of the state’s total. This concentration is notable because these districts include some of Maharashtra’s most densely populated and high-mobility urban areas, where frequent migration and address changes tend to complicate voter verification.
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Mumbai alone had recorded around 30 lakh voters as untraced earlier in the SIR process.
The pattern isn’t confined to the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. In Nagpur district, roughly 13.36 lakh voters fell into the uncollectable category, while the wider Nagpur division recorded around 34.96 lakh such voters. Importantly, “uncollectable” does not mean these voters have automatically been struck off the electoral rolls. Election authorities must still follow the prescribed verification process, and eligible voters will get a chance to file claims and objections if their names are found missing from the draft roll.
What Happens Next
The draft electoral roll is scheduled for publication on August 24. A claims and objections window will follow, during which voters can verify their names and details and approach election officials if they believe they’ve been wrongly excluded or need corrections made. The final electoral roll is due to be published on October 27.
With the number of uncollected forms this high, the next phase of the exercise takes on added significance. While the Election Commission’s goal is to clean up the rolls by weeding out outdated, duplicate or incorrect entries, the process will also need to guard against eligible voters being inadvertently left out.
For Maharashtra, the fact that nearly half of all uncollected forms are concentrated in Thane, Mumbai and Pune makes urban voter verification one of the central challenges of this electoral roll revision.
