Epic failures: on electoral roll, welfare

Union Panchayati Raj Minister Rajiv Ranjan Singh’s statement that voter identity cards, with biometric authentication, will replace Aadhaar as the basis for identifying beneficiaries and making payments under his Ministry’s schemes runs contrary to existing laws and regulations. Essentially, the electoral roll, prepared in several States through the flawed Special Intensive Revision (SIR) by the Election Commission of India (ECI), will become the dataset to vet the identities of beneficiaries. This contradicts the Supreme Court’s May 27 judgment on the Bihar SIR and its observations while hearing petitions against West Bengal’s orders removing people deleted during the SIR from the Public Distribution System and the Annapurna Yojana. The Court held that the ECI may undertake only a “limited enquiry” into citizenship to decide who belongs on the electoral roll, and that “any action taken pursuant thereto is confined to electoral consequences alone”. The consequence of deletion from the rolls, it said, is “correspondingly limited” to a person’s place on the roll and their right to vote. The Court also called the EPIC “a derivative document, issued on the basis of inclusion in the electoral roll”, and held that relying on it to verify that very roll would defeat the exercise. It is ironic that Mr. Singh now wants this “derivative document” to be the determinant of welfare benefits.

Not every citizen is an eligible voter, and tying benefits to the electoral roll is illogical and also cruel. In West Bengal, lakhs were deleted from the rolls, many for dubious “logical discrepancies”. In the appeals heard for reinstatement, 93% resulted in the restoration of names by September 2026, pointing to massive pre-election disenfranchisement. The Court has stated that it is yet to adjudicate on the legality of the ECI’s “logical discrepancies” method. The SIR was designed by the ECI to restrict enrolment through stringent residency criteria; thus, itinerant voters had to prove their eligibility. The Opposition, civil society and even some of the BJP’s allies have objected to this, but the BJP refuses to acknowledge the SIR’s flaws. This is partly because it has benefited from disenfranchisement — as in West Bengal. But the Minister’s remarks suggest another reason. The BJP-led coalition sees the pruned electoral rolls as a way to limit welfare, especially at a time when growth in tax revenues has slowed because of the Centre’s policies. Inordinately delaying the Census, changing the procedure to appoint Election Commissioners, who then run an exercise that disenfranchises millions by design, and now, using the resultant rolls to decide who gets welfare, all cut at the heart of the painstakingly built constitutional welfare state. The sooner the Court decides the petitions against the SIR, and reiterates that its rolls cannot be used to curtail welfare, the better.