India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar said in Ahmedabad earlier this month that problems related to exclusion of names in the Special Intensive Review (SIR) in states would be resolved by the Lok Sabha polls in 2029.

“Our focus is to clean the electoral rolls of those who are dead, shifted, absent and duplicates from the electoral rolls. As a Constitutional authority, we depend on documents. You have to provide your documents or of your parents, to prove you are Indian,” he said, recalling that a similar SIR exercise was also conducted in 2003-2004.

Let’s look at the numbers to examine what happened during the 2003-2004 SIR.

Before the SIR started in 2003-04, the total number of voters in India was 63.8 crore. By the time the SIR ended before the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, the number of voters had increased to 67.18 crore. Since there was an increase of about 5.9 crore voters between the 1999 and 2004 elections, there was no uproar.

The reason was that the growth in the total number of voters was similar to the growth recorded between Lok Sabha polls since the 1970s and met the population projections for the time. As per the 2001 census, India’s population was 1.02 billion, and the........

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