ECI will reduce India's population to 50 crore: Kejriwal on Delhi SIR deletions

The Election Commission of India will reduce the country’s population from 140 crore to 50 crore through its voter-list revision exercise, Aam Aadmi Party national convenor Arvind Kejriwal said on Monday, hours after Delhi’s draft electoral roll was published with the names of more than 47.5 lakh voters missing.

The draft roll, prepared under the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), includes 97,53,577 electors out of the 1,45,10,299 voters on the existing roll. This means nearly one in three registered voters in the capital does not figure in the draft list.

"The draft voter list for Delhi under the SIR has been released. Out of 1.5 crore, the names of 47 lakh voters are missing. The Government of India is unnecessarily worried about the population. Through SIR, the Election Commission will reduce our country's population from 140 crore to 50 crore," Kejriwal said in a post on X.

The SIR exercise involved a house-to-house enumeration drive across Delhi that began on 30 June and ended on 17 August. Booth-level officers collected and digitised enumeration forms for about 67.18 per cent of the city's electorate.

The remaining 47,56,722 electors have been categorised as 'uncollectable' under the Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others (ASDDO) categories and do not figure in the draft roll. Officials have said the categorisation followed the house-to-house verification exercise and does not mean the voters have been permanently deleted from the electoral rolls.

The scale of the exclusion has nevertheless triggered political concerns, with opposition parties questioning the impact of the SIR on voters whose enumeration forms could not be collected or digitised.

The draft publication is not the final stage of the revision. Voters whose names are missing can file claims for inclusion through Form 6, along with the required declaration and supporting documents, between 31 August and 30 September. The claims and objections will be examined until 29 October, after which the final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on 4 November.

The extent of the exclusions also varied sharply across Delhi's 70 Assembly constituencies. Rohini recorded the highest form-digitisation rate at 83.43 per cent, while Tughlakabad recorded the lowest at 52.15 per cent.

With PTI inputs