The Election Commission has asked Punjab and Haryana, among the other 22 states and Union Territories, to prepare for the upcoming Special Intensive Revision (SIR) at the earliest, as the exercise is likely to commence in April.
The EC said that once the exercise is completed, all states and UTs will be covered.
In a letter to the chief electoral officers of Punjab, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir, the poll authority had asked for the SIR of the voters' list in June last year.
Letters have been sent to the chief electoral officers of Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli & Daman and Diu, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Ladakh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Delhi, Odisha, Sikkim, Tripura, Telangana, and Uttarakhand, demanding the same SIR of the voters list on Thursday.
Under pressure from Congress’s “vote chori allegations”, the ECI conducted SIR of electoral rolls in 13 states and UTs.
It is now prepared to hold similar exercises in the remaining 22 states and UTs in 2026. The exercise, which became controversial in Bihar and gained major media traction, was completed in Bihar; it is now ongoing in 12 states and UTs with more than 60 crore electors in the revision exercise.
The remaining approximately 40 crore electors will be covered in these 22 states and five UTs. In Assam, a 'special revision', instead of SIR, was completed on February 10.
Due to technical and other issues, the SIR in nearly nine states and 3 UTs has seen frequent disruptions, especially in Bihar, leading opposition parties to approach the Supreme Court, challenging the SIR in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
TMC Chief Mamata Banerjee personally pleaded before a bench led by the Chief Justice of India against the poll roll clean-up exercise in her state.
Meanwhile, opposition parties have alleged that the SIR exercise is being deployed to benefit the ruling BJP and its allies in the polls, since the majority of the people removed from the rolls during SIR were non-BJP voters.
Follow us
