Nationwide SIR to begin next week; poll-bound Tamil Nadu, Bengal in first phase

ECI will exclude states where local body elections are currently underway or imminent as election authorities there are engaged in poll duties.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) is expected to announce on Monday the schedule for the first phase of the nationwide special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, beginning with around 10 to 15 states and Union territories, including poll-bound Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, officials said on Saturday.

The move follows the completion of the SIR exercise in Bihar, where the final electoral roll was published on September 30.(HT File Photo)

The pan-India exercise, aimed at weeding out discrepancies and verifying voters’ credentials, will begin next week in states and UTs where assembly elections are due in early 2026, including Assam, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala and West Bengal.

According to officials, ECI will exclude states where local body elections are currently underway or imminent, as the election machinery there is engaged in poll duties. The SIR in such regions will be scheduled in subsequent phases, they added.

The move follows the completion of the exercise in Bihar, where the final electoral roll—comprising nearly 74.2 million voters—was published on September 30. Bihar will vote in two phases on November 6 and 11, with counting on November 14.

ECI has already held two conferences with state chief electoral officers (CEOs) to finalise the roll-out plan. In most states, mapping of current electors with records from their last SIR—conducted mostly between 2002 and 2004—has been nearly completed. The previous SIRs will serve as the reference point for the ongoing revision, as was done in Bihar where the 2003 rolls were used as the baseline.

Meanwhile, ECI on Saturday informed the Madras high court that SIR of the Tamil Nadu electoral rolls will commence next week along with the states going to face elections.

Appearing before a bench of chief justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and justice G Arul Murugan, ECI’s counsel Niranjan Rajagopal said that the grievances raised by a petitioner seeking re-verification of voter rolls in Chennai’s T Nagar constituency would be addressed during the proposed revision. The court took note of the commission’s submission and adjourned the matter for a week.

The upcoming revision follows the model of the Bihar exercise, which has drawn both praise for its scale and criticism from Opposition parties alleging large-scale deletions and discrepancies in the updated voter list.