A preliminary report by the Sabar Institute finds that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) removed 1,58,677 names from Manipur’s electoral roll in a “striking divide” between hills and valley, with the 20 hill constituencies account for 66.4% of all deletions.
The report is based on the official lists of absent, shifted and dead voters for all 3,014 polling booths across the state’s 60 Assembly seats. Hill booths lost 79 names each on average, against 31 in the Imphal Valley, which is about 2.5 times as many. To be sure, the deletion data is based on the draft SIR roll for the state.
Sabar Institute is a Kolkata-based research organisation whose tagline is “Data for better lives”. It describes itself as a small, independent and wholly crowdfunded team that analyses SIR deletion data to detect patterns of disproportionate impact by constituency, polling station, gender and recorded reason. The Manipur report is authored by Sabir Ahamed, Souptik Halder and Ashin Chakraborty.
Following an ethnic conflict in the state that has been raging since 2023, the Kuki people have retreated to the hills and the Meitei have stayed in the valley. At least 217 people have been killed in the violence, and around 58,800 people have been displaced and live in refuge camps, including in neighbouring Mizoram.
“This report does not say that anyone was removed on purpose, or that any community was targeted,” the report states in its executive summary.
{{/usCountry}}“This report does not say that anyone was removed on purpose, or that any community was targeted,” the report states in its executive summary.
{{/usCountry}}The largest number of deletions are in Churachandpur district. Its four seats account for 38,264 removals, or 24.1% of the state total, which is more than Imphal West (17,187) and Imphal East (16,709) put together. The district lost 132 names per booth, against a state average of about 53. Saikot constituency in the district is an extreme case, with 14,152 names removed across 84 booths, or roughly 168 per booth. That is about seven times the 23 per booth recorded in Singjamei in Imphal West.
The SIR is a door-to-door check in which officers visit each address and confirm whether the listed voter still lives there. Names that cannot be confirmed are entered in the absent, shifted, dead (ASD) lists, and each name carries one of four recorded reasons: permanently shifted, dead, untraceable or absent, and already enrolled elsewhere. Of the 20 hill seats, 19 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes.
That backdrop of violence in the state is central to how the numbers should be read. The report warns that a person living in a relief camp “may be recorded” as having permanently shifted or as untraceable “without ever having chosen to move.” The source data does not separate displacement from ordinary migration, so the two look almost identical in the records. The report also notes that hill booths are generally smaller than valley booths, which means the real gap between the two regions is, if anything, wider than the figures suggest.
HT reached out to the Manipur chief electoral officer for a comment but did not get a response.
The recorded reasons differ sharply by geography. In the hills, 76 of every 100 removals were marked “Permanently Shifted” or “Untraceable/Absent”, against 52 in the valley. Death explains 43 of every 100 valley removals but only 19 in the hills. Seat by seat, the report finds that the more names a constituency lost per booth, the larger the share attributed to shifting and the smaller the share attributed to death.
This matters because death is the only one of the four grounds that can be checked against a separate government record. The other three, the report says, “rest on what the visiting officer was told at the door.” Across the state, 72,473 names were removed as shifted (45.7%) and 35,810 as untraceable (22.6%), which together make up about 68% of all deletions. Another 43,000 names (27.1%) were removed as dead, and 7,394 (4.7%) as already enrolled elsewhere.
Women dominate the deletion lists. Of the names removed, 88,799 belong to women, nearly 56% of the total, and women outnumber men in every one of the 60 constituencies. The share ranges from 51% in Patsoi to 69% in Wabgai. The report calls this unusual, since men formed the larger group in similar exercises examined by Sabar Institute in other parts of the country.
Marriage appears to be part of the explanation. Of the women removed, 46,786, or 53%, are listed on the roll under a husband’s name rather than a father’s, and women make up 64% of all removals for shifting. A woman who moves to her husband’s village after marriage must be taken off one list and added to another, and the report says that is “when a name gets lost.” Among the women removed, 52% were recorded as shifted, against 37% among men.
For Manipur, Sabar recommends that officials check the worst-hit booths first, especially the shifted and untraceable cases in the hill seats. It also calls for a simple way to file objections, free legal aid for those who cannot manage the paperwork, and publication of roll totals for each seat so that removal rates can be worked out. It urges special attention to displaced families and to women who moved after marriage.
The report places Manipur within a wider exercise that Sabar Institute describes as the largest voter-roll deletion in history. The crowdfunded institute says it wants such exercises “examined with data, not guesswork,” and has called for an independent countrywide study of the SIR.