Who is being left out of voter rolls? What Aadhaar reveals about SIR

There are 16.3 crore adults (18+ years) in Uttar Pradesh. This is not just an estimate on paper. These are real people whose biometrics, photographs and addresses are registered in the Aadhaar database. (UIDAI, ‘Aadhaar saturation report’, 2026)

Some of these 16.3 crore may have died, may be living abroad or are foreign citizens. But these are a tiny fraction of the total, according to UIDAI. So, roughly 16 crore adults in UP are entitled to vote.

Yet only 13.4 crore people in UP are on the electoral rolls published by the Election Commission of India (ECI) after its Special Intensive Revision (SIR). That is, nearly 3 crore adults (18 per cent) are missing from the electoral rolls.

Aadhaar is a live database of real people, most of whom use their Aadhaar to collect MGNREGA wages, operate bank accounts, buy rations and so on. It is also biometrically de-duplicated, so no one person can be registered twice under different names, photographs or addresses. Contrast that with the electoral rolls, where one Brazilian model’s photo appeared against 22 voters in Haryana.

Sure, many of these adults may have migrated to other states for work but are still registered in UP. But the EC allows such migrants to stay on the voter rolls of their home state. And where one’s Aadhaar is registered in one state and one’s vote in another, the two should even out in a national count.

Even after allowing for every exception, UP is missing 2.5-3 crore voters (15-18 per cent of its adults). The question then becomes — is this deliberate, targeted exclusion by the SIR, or simply adults who don’t bother to register because voting is not compulsory in India?

Yogendra Yadav and Jean Drèze argue it is the former, while economist Surjit Bhalla says it is the latter. This is the crux of four long articles between them in this paper.

If this were just voter apathy, as Bhalla argues, then such apathy should be roughly similar across states, allowing for some variation in political awareness. It is not. In the 14 large states that have completed the SIR, which together account for 70 per cent of all of India’s adults, the “apathy” factor ranges from 7 per cent to 21 per cent. Can apathy towards voting really vary threefold within one nation? Bhalla’s “apathy” explanation is unconvincing.

I analysed the count of Aadhaar adults (18+ years) with post-SIR count of enrolled voters in 14 states — Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Odisha, Keralam, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Goa — using official data from UIDAI and EC.

This is the first such article to compare “Aadhaarised” adults with enrolled voters because until now, all arguments have been based on population counted by Census 2011 (too dated) or projected population estimates from the report of the Technical Group of the government (an estimate). Aadhaar is a register of real people, each enrolled with fingerprints and iris scans and biometrically de-duplicated, far more credible and authentic.

The analysis threw up four curious findings.

One: Across these 14 states, 9 crore adults are on Aadhaar’s servers but missing from the ECI’s rolls. For numerical context, this is akin to the entire nation of Germany being excluded from the electoral rolls of all of Europe.

Two: The share of missing voters ranges from 21 per cent in Goa and 19 per cent in Punjab and Uttarakhand to 7 per cent in Odisha and Tamil Nadu. Are Goans and Punjabis three times more apathetic about elections than Odias and Tamils? Obviously, a facetious question.

Three: Why are missing voters highest in exactly the states that vote next? Goa, Punjab, Uttarakhand and UP top this table of missing voters, and all four go to the polls in early 2027. If anything, an upcoming election should inspire more people to register, not fewer. Can this really be dismissed as mere coincidence or is it indicative of something more devious?

Four: If inter-state migration can explain this gap between Aadhaar adults and enrolled voters, then “receiving” states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat should have more voters than “Aadhaarised” adults. None does. If a worker from Gorakhpur has moved to Chennai semi-permanently for work, the combined Aadhaar and voter data of UP and Tamil Nadu should account for her. They do not. And Bihar, India’s great exporter of labour, should top the table of missing voters. It is near the bottom. Clearly, inter-state migration cannot explain the missing voters.

All this raises another simple question — if the stated intent of the SIR is to clean up voter lists, why not use Aadhaar as the disinfectant? The Narendra Modi government claims Aadhaar-enabled direct benefit transfers have saved a whopping Rs 5 lakh crore (over $50bn) by weeding out ghost, duplicate and fake beneficiaries. If Aadhaar is good enough to save $50bn for the nation by removing ghosts, then surely it is good enough to purify the nation’s electoral rolls? The argument that foreign citizens can get Aadhaar and so it cannot be used to clean voter rolls is fallacious. Every Aadhaar holder need not be a voter but every voter is an Aadhaar holder.

In fact, in March 2025, the ECI itself announced that it would link voter IDs with Aadhaar to weed out duplicates and ghosts. The opposition parties supported the move. Three months later, much to everyone’s surprise, the ECI suddenly announced the SIR instead, abandoning the Aadhaar linkage proposal.

Suffice it to say, all is not well with the SIR, in idea or in implementation. It raises more questions than it answers. No amount of data obfuscation or statistical jugglery can justify 9 crore adults missing from the rolls of just 14 states. The ECI under Gyanesh Kumar is, at best, incompetent and, at worst, malevolent. Either way, he has to go.

Chakravarty is a Member of Parliament and chairperson, Data Analytics, Indian National Congress