In India’s capital, Delhiites reduced to documents

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Residents of a JJ cluster in Pul Mithai, part of Chandni Chowk constituency, who received notices from the Election Commission. Many residents said they lacked the prescribed documents required for SIR verification. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap

Aadhaar number. PAN card. Voter ID. Ration card. Sanichari Devi, 63, has packed all of these documents into a polythene bag for the special intensive revision (SIR) hearing at the Government Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, a government school near Mori Gate in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk Assembly constituency on September 15.

These were the papers by which the State had recognised her, again and again, as a citizen all these years, she claims. But that afternoon they were not enough.

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“First, the official at the hearing asked me to bring a bank passbook for which I had to return home,” she says. Home is about two kilometres away in an overcrowded Chandni Chowk locality. “When I came back panting, I was again sent another kilometre to get a photocopy of the documents,” she says on this errand alone.

“ Tum log hai na padha likha toh bhi nahi bujha raha hai ki ka ka chahiye, hum toh hain hi angootha chaap , [You are all educated; even then you’re not telling us clearly what documents are needed. I am unlettered],” she says, distressed by the officials’ impatience and their cryptic responses.

For nearly two hours, Devi, who claims her name was on the 2002 electoral roll in Bihar , where she was born, clutches her papers trying to understand the process of staying on India’s electoral roll. She is surrounded by 70 to 80 people, all with similar problems.

Devi is a daily-wage earner. Her ₹400-500 for the day is lost, and she has no idea how to pay for her family of three, including two grandsons. Her son and daughter-in-law are no more. Exhausted from walking and distressed from losing a day’s wage, Devi faints in the afternoon sun. Two men catch her before she falls and help her to a chair.

The government school in Chandni Chowk is one of the three locations in this Assembly constituency where SIR hearings are taking place. These hearings are for voters who had notices served to them for anomalies, like name mismatches, and for being unmapped — meaning their names or relatives’ names were not found on older SIR rolls.

At every hearing location, 100 to 1,000 people turn up every day with documents to prove that they are eligible to vote. Once they are there, many find that none of their documents match the 11 ID proofs prescribed by the Election Commission of India for the SIR. The exercise, rolled out in 2025 just before the Bihar Assembly election, was intended to clean up voter lists by identifying duplicate entries and removing the names of those who have died, moved from their addresses, or are illegal migrants. But since it was rolled out, and now having covered 30 of India’s States and Union Territories, over 13 crore people on the voter list have been removed during the draft stage.