Dehradun: SDC Foundation President Anoop Nautiyal has raised fresh questions over the sharp decline in Uttarakhand’s electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), pointing to a gap of roughly 11 lakh voters compared with the voter base around the 2022 Assembly elections.
In a video released on October 3, Nautiyal examined the newly published electoral roll and questioned whether the dramatic reduction can be adequately explained by routine factors such as deaths, migration, duplicate entries and changes of residence—or whether a substantial number of eligible voters may have been left out.
The final SIR roll published on October 3 contains 71,58,949 electors. At the beginning of SIR on June 8, the state had 79,60,762 electors, while the 2022 Assembly election final roll had about 79.58 lakh voters.
The comparison therefore needs to be made carefully: the immediate SIR-related decline from the pre-SIR roll is around 8 lakh, rather than 11 lakh.
The larger roughly 11-lakh figure emerges when the comparison is made with the approximately 83-lakh voter figure cited for the 2022 election period. The distinction matters because electoral rolls change through deaths, migration, duplicate deletions, new enrolments and other corrections.
But, Nautiyal's central question is precisely what accounts for the scale of the reduction.
Uttarakhand has 13 districts, with Dehradun, Haridwar, Nainital and Udham Singh Nagar forming the four major plains districts. These districts carry a disproportionately large share of the state's electorate. Officially, the SIR process itself began with nearly 79.6 lakh electors, making the subsequent reduction a significant electoral-roll change.
The district-level picture also warrants scrutiny. According to data reported during the claims-and-objections phase, 1,30,382 Form-7 deletion applications were received, with Udham Singh Nagar, Haridwar, Dehradun and Nainital together accounting for more than 85% of those applications.
Nautiyal has particular interest in Dharampur Assembly constituency in Dehradun, which had previously recorded one of the state's largest increases in voters. In an earlier SDC Foundation analysis, Dharampur had registered a 72% increase in voters over a decade, prompting the Election Commission to order an investigation into unusually rapid changes in voter numbers.
The latest numbers turn that earlier question on its head.
If voter numbers had risen sharply in some constituencies over the previous decade, and thousands of names have now disappeared from the rolls through SIR, what exactly explains the swing in the opposite direction?
Deaths would account for some deletions. Migration could account for others. Duplicate or incorrect entries could also legitimately be removed. But the public needs a category-wise, district-wise and constituency-wise breakup of the deletions to understand the scale and nature of the change.
That is particularly important because the Election Commission has now directed a fresh exercise to identify eligible voters who were on the pre-SIR roll but are missing from the final list. Booth Level Officers will compare the rolls, contact such voters and facilitate their re-enrolment where they are found eligible.
The development puts the spotlight not merely on the number of voters deleted, but on the audit trail behind every major category of deletion.
How many were dead? How many had permanently migrated? How many were duplicates? How many could not be contacted? How many were shifted because of changes in address? And, most importantly, how many eligible voters were inadvertently left out?
These are questions that require data rather than political assertions.
The issue also comes at a time when the Election Commission is facing intense political criticism nationally over the SIR exercise. Opposition parties have questioned the process and raised concerns about voter exclusion, while the Commission has maintained mechanisms for claims, objections and subsequent enrolment.
For Uttarakhand, however, Nautiyal's intervention shifts the focus towards a more basic demographic question: if the electoral roll has changed by such a large number, where did those voters go—and why?
The answer could lie in a combination of demographic change, migration, mortality and electoral-roll correction. But until the Election Commission provides the detailed breakup, the 11-lakh headline number alone cannot establish the reason for the decline or prove deliberate deletion.
What it does establish is the need for a transparent accounting of one of the most significant changes in Uttarakhand's electoral roll in recent years.
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