Jaipur: A social audit involving door-to-door verification and public reading of electoral rolls after Rajasthan’s 2002-03 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) led to around 16 lakh names being added following complaints that genuine voters had been deleted while ineligible names remained, an RTI reply obtained by civil rights activists has revealed.However, during the latest SIR in 2026, the Rajasthan chief electoral officer (CEO) office allegedly declined a request for a similar public audit, citing lack of provision to read out rolls after final publication.Responding to the activists’ charge, CEO Naveen Mahajan said, “This (2026 SIR) was not a state-specific exercise. The Bihar template was adopted nationwide, so the ECI would be better placed to explain the rationale behind it.”Documents obtained by activist and MKSS founder Nikhil Dey through RTI show that complaints by civil society organisations and political parties had prompted then Chief Election Commissioner James Lyngdoh to visit Rajasthan and meet groups in Jaipur. It was agreed that electoral rolls would be read out during door-to-door verification and displayed at Gram Sabha, Ward Sabha and Nukkad Sabha to identify and correct errors. Guidelines were subsequently issued on Aug 6, 2003, after which around 16 lakh names were added to the rolls.Seeking to replicate that process during the latest SIR, Dey and other civil society representatives wrote to the CEO’s office on June 22, 2026, requesting a public reading of revised rolls at a Gram Sabha in Delwara panchayat of Beawar district.In a reply dated Aug 30, the election department said the March 2023 Manual on Electoral Rolls provides for reading out draft rolls during special summary revision (SSR), but has no instruction for doing so at Gram Sabha or Ward Sabha after final publication. It also said final rolls had been published (in Feb 2026) on the department website after SIR.Civil society groups cited experiences in Delhi and Karnataka to argue that public participation and local-level verification help identify omissions and errors.The RTI reply also outlined a key distinction between the verification processes of the 2002-03 and 2025-26 revisions. Official documents related to 2002-03 SIR of electoral rolls do not mention the use of enumeration forms, mapping of electors with the previous SIR roll and provisions relating to “logical discrepancy” — three key requirements introduced in the 2026 SIR exercise. Dey has demanded withdrawal of all the three provisions.Also, while the ongoing SIR required voters to map their names or relatives’ names to the previous SIR roll, the 2002-03 revision used the current/existing electoral roll as the reference document for house-to-house verification, as stated in a July 2001 ECI letter.Election Commission of India (ECI) special guidelines for 2002-03 SIR noted that citizenship determination was not the responsibility of enumerators during the revision, contrasting with current practices that examine citizenship documents when discrepancies arise.Dey expressed concerns that the ongoing SIR’s provisions could foster insecurity among electors and lead to potential disenfranchisement, stressing that changes in the electoral roll could have broader implications for voters’ eligibility for govt services.
