By Maktoob
Nearly 19.4 lakh electors across Hyderabad’s 15 Assembly constituencies have been marked for deletion under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, according to a preliminary analysis by the Sabar Institute and Constitutional Guardians Forum.
The analysis of the published Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASD) rolls found 1,941,444 electors listed for deletion across 4,094 polling parts. The figure amounts to 46.1% of the January 2023 electoral roll used as the report’s baseline.
The researchers caution that the 2023 roll subsequently grew, meaning the percentage deleted is an upper-bound estimate.
The scale of the deletions, the report argues, raises questions extending beyond electoral arithmetic to the right to political participation, access to government institutions, procedural fairness and the unequal burden placed on people with limited documentation or mobility.
The report notes that removal from the electoral roll does not, by itself, cancel a person’s citizenship or legal entitlement to public services.
However, electoral documents can be used in everyday dealings with the state, meaning exclusion from the rolls can create additional administrative burdens for affected citizens.
Deletions exceed winning margins in every constituency
The report found that ASD deletions exceed the 2023 winning margin in all 15 Assembly constituencies.
The disparity is particularly striking in constituencies where the number of deletions approaches or exceeds the entire number of votes cast in the 2023 election.
In Malakpet, 147,799 voters have been listed for deletion, compared with 132,024 votes polled in 2023.
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