At the Blind Relief Association campus in the New Delhi constituency, 10 voters who were added to the electoral roll in January 2025, a month before the assembly elections, have now been removed. The reason recorded for their deletion: “permanently shifted.”

They were residential students at the NGO, which runs a senior secondary school and a vocational training centre with skilling courses. David Absalom, the NGO’s executive secretary, said that ahead of the 2025 elections, the district administration had approached the organisation to hold a special camp for visually impaired students. Tejinder Singh Bisht, an administrative staff member, said the organisation had long been in discussions with poll officials.

The Election Commission’s own manual allows hostel students to register as voters and to qualify under the ordinarily resident clause, provided the course runs for at least a year and is recognised by a government, board or university.

But there were two reasons why these students were deleted: one, because most of them were now registered as voters outside Delhi, and two, their residential skilling course was already complete when the enumeration phase was still underway. They could not be reached for comment.

An analysis of the New Delhi constituency shows that voters added to the rolls in the two months before the February 2025 elections have been disproportionately removed in this year’s SIR draft. Of the 1,430 voters added in January 2025, 560 – nearly four in 10 – have been deleted. Of the 2,369 added in December 2024, 783, or roughly a third, have gone the same way. 

The constituency – from where AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal lost with a thin margin to BJP’s Pravesh Verma in 2025 – had 1,08,788 electors during the assembly elections. The SIR removed 37,315 of them, a deletion rate of about 34.3 percent. Between January 2025 and June 2026, before the SIR even began, the constituency had already recorded 25,185 deletions against just 5,713 additions. Add the SIR’s own 37,315 removals, and the constituency has lost a total of 62,500........

© newslaundry