SIR verification set to begin in Delhi in April

The SIR marks the 14th such revision of electoral rolls since Independence, with the last conducted between 2002 and 2004.

Ahead of the roll-out of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Delhi, election officials in the city on Thursday said the groundwork has been completed in the Capital.

Representative photo (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The Election Commission of India (ECI) in a letter on Thursday, ECI told the chief electoral officers (CEOs) of 22 states and Union Territories (UTs), including Delhi, that the next phase of SIR will begin from April 2026, directing them to complete preparatory work at the earliest.

The SIR marks the 14th such revision of electoral rolls since Independence, with the last conducted between 2002 and 2004. It involves door-to-door verification, document scrutiny, and systematic removal of duplicate, deceased or shifted voters under the Representation of the People Act, 1950.

The Special Summary Revision, 2025, released by the Delhi chief electoral officer, showed that the Capital had 1,55,24,858 registered voters, of which 83,49,645 are men, 71,73,952 are women and 1,261 third-gender voters.

Officials said the training of all staff, including district election officers, electoral registration officers, assistant electoral registration officers and booth-level officers (BLOs), for the exercise was conducted last year and BLOs had been deployed across all Assembly constituencies in Delhi.

The voter list of the 2002 SIR as well as the mapping of present Assembly constituencies with those that existed at the time have been uploaded to the website of the CEO, Delhi, to allow residents to cross-check their details before BLOs begin house-to-house visits.

In a public notice last year, Delhi election authorities had urged residents to verify their names or the names of their parents in the old voter list.

During the house-to-house (H2H) visits, BLOs will distribute the enumeration forms and then collect them after they have been filled along with the necessary documents.

Electors whose names appear in both the 2002 and 2025 voter lists will need to submit only the enumeration form along with the extract of the 2002 voter list.

In cases where the name of a voter does not appear in the 2002 list but the names of their parents do, the individual will have to submit one identity document along with the enumeration form and the relevant section from the 2002 list of their parents.

Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Virendra Sachdeva welcomed the announcement saying that the party has constituted teams of workers, including a lawyer, at both state- and district-levels to assist voters.

Sachdeva also said the BJP would extend full cooperation to the ECI to ensure that the names of all Bangladeshi and Rohingya settlers illegally residing in Delhi are removed from the voter lists.

Anil Bhardwaj, chairman and media communication incharge of Delhi Congress, said its booth-level agents across parliamentary and all Assembly constituencies have been appointed and trained, and that they are fully prepared for the exercise.

“One round of preparatory training has been completed for all 60 electoral registration officers, assistant electoral registration officers and booth level officers. But we will need to conduct another round of training for officials since many of them have been transferred or moved to other departments. We have a meeting on Friday on the matter. We are yet to see the communication from EC,” an official said.

Other than Delhi, the upcoming phase will cover the UT of Chandigarh, the UT of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, the UT of Jammu and Kashmir, the UT of Ladakh, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Punjab, Sikkim, Tripura, Telangana and Uttarakhand. This is the third phase of this exercise.