A quarter of Telangana's voters cannot simply disappear. The Election Commission must show its working

Telangana went into the Special Intensive Revision of its electoral roll with 3.38 crore voters. With most notice hearings done, election officials now count about 2.50 crore as eligible. If nothing changes, roughly 88 lakh people, more than one in four of the state’s voters, will not be on the final roll published on 9 November.

That number may yet come down. About 9.6 lakh cases are still being checked, and new voters are being added through fresh applications. But even on the most generous count, the state would end the exercise with something like 78 lakh fewer electors than it started with. No democracy should treat a change of that size as a routine clean-up.

The fair objection

There is a real case for a revision. Indian rolls carry the dead, the duplicated and people who moved years ago. A fast-growing city like Hyderabad draws migrants who register in one place and live in another. Clean rolls protect honest voters, because every ghost entry is a vote someone else could misuse. The Supreme Court upheld the order behind the revision in the Bihar case in May.

So the question is not whether names should ever be removed. It is whether the people removed were given a fair chance to prove they belong, and whether anyone outside the Commission can check.

Who falls through

The figures from Telangana suggest where the danger lies. Of about 92.9 lakh people sent notices, more than three lakh did not turn up to their hearings, and nearly 10,000 stayed away even after they were rescheduled. Only about 30,000 have so far been found ineligible after a hearing. That means most of those at risk are not people shown to be ineligible. They are people the system could not reach, or who could not reach it: daily wage workers who cannot lose a day, the elderly, women whose names changed after marriage, migrants working in another state.

A voter who misses a notice is not the same as a voter who does not exist. The Commission says it will reschedule hearings and send officials to voters’ homes. That promise should become a rule.

What the Commission should do

First, before 9 November, it should publish every name proposed for deletion, booth by booth, with the reason: dead, shifted, duplicate, or did not respond. Political parties, panchayats and residents’ groups can then catch mistakes that officials miss.

Second, no one should be removed only for failing to attend a hearing unless a booth-level officer has visited their home at least once and recorded the result.

Third, people left off the final roll should be able to come back quickly, through a simple claim at the local office, without starting from scratch as a new voter.

Fourth, the Commission should release Telangana’s district-wise figures officially, with its own explanation, rather than leaving the numbers to emerge through unnamed officials.

Telangana’s figures will feed straight into the national argument over the revision, which opposition parties have taken to the Supreme Court. The Commission’s best answer to its critics is not a press conference. It is a list that anyone can read.

The reporting behind this view

• 3.38 crorevoters on Telangana's roll before the revision
• 2.50 crorecounted as eligible so far, 26% fewer
• 3 lakh+people who did not appear for their notice hearings
• 9 Novemberfinal roll due