Delhi SIR: draft roll publication deferred to Aug. 31 amid delay in polling station rationalisation

The Election Commission of India (EC) on Wednesday issued an order deferring the publication of the draft electoral roll for Delhi as part of the special intensive revision (SIR) to August 31 from August 24, following a request from the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ashok Kumar for more time to complete the rationalisation of polling stations to a limit of 1,200 voters per booth, an official said.

The final roll will now be published on November 4. The filing of claims and objections will be open from August 31 to September 30, while the notice and disposal phase will continue until October 29, according to the EC order.

A senior election official said the rationalisation process, which involves identifying polling stations with more than 1,200 voters from the existing 1,500 and shifting electors to another or a new polling station, was scheduled to be completed along with the door-to-door enumeration phase on August 17 but was still under way.

“The deadline for the exercise has now been extended to August 24 following a request made by the Delhi election authorities on Monday. The draft rolls cannot be published until the rearrangement of polling stations is completed,” the official said.

As per the data at the end of the enumeration phase, 97.5 lakh (67.2%) voters out of a total of 1.45 crore will appear in the draft roll. Of these, more than a third — over 33 lakh — are either unmapped or have anomalies in their data.

The remaining 47.7 lakh voters, marked “uncollectable” and placed under the Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others (ASDDO) categories, will not appear in the draft roll. The list of such voters is set to be published within the next two days.

So far, the rationalisation process has been completed in three districts: Northwest, Outer North and North. 

Across the 13 districts, 5,480 of the 13,033 polling stations were found to have more than 1,200 electors, according to data accessed by The Hindu.

As of Monday, the initial deadline for rationalisation, nearly 270 polling stations were still pending across 15 constituencies, including Sangam Vihar, Dwarka, Matiala, Palam, Krishna Nagar, Laxmi Nagar and Karawal Nagar.

After new polling stations are identified, the approval of political parties is also sought.

Fresh challenges

Meanwhile, Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) are facing difficulty in identifying additional rooms for assigning polling stations, especially in unauthorised colonies such as Sangam Vihar. “In unauthorised colonies or where the population is higher, but the number of government schools or community centres is less, the EROs are facing challenges,” an official said.

To send a revised proposal for the remaining 270 polling stations, the EROs have now been asked to submit the “tentative number of electors” likely to remain at the concerned polling station after the deletion of ASDDO electors.

Sources said proposals for approval sent to the EC earlier were returned with instructions to rationalise as many polling stations as possible and resubmit them in the week before the initial deadline. At the time, 443 polling stations in various constituencies had sought exemption but were asked to revisit their proposals.