E-Paper
The lack of a timely Census has muddied the SIR debate | Number Theory
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The majority of deletions in electoral rolls under the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise can be explained by de-duplication of multiple entries, this newspaper argued on Thursday. The argument was based on a strong correlation between districts by their share in state-wise growth in electors and share in deletions as seen in the draft roll released immediately after the enumeration phase. To be sure, as that analysis pointed out, this circumstantial evidence needs to be backed by more data to provide conclusive proof that this is indeed the case. While some of the data can be released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and respective Chief Electoral Officers (CEO) if they wanted to, there is a bigger data hole which cannot be plugged even if the agencies wanted to. This is on account of the inordinate delay in conducting a census after 2011 ; it was delayed from 2021 onwards on the excuse of the pandemic, even as equally intensive exercises, such as elections, were conducted on schedule. Here are three charts which explain the argument in detail.
