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Kolkata: Before the third phase of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls, Delhi had 1,45,10,299 registered voters. By August 17, Booth Level Officers (BLOs) working house to house had collected forms from 97,53,577 of them. The rest, 47,56,722 names, did not appear on the draft roll published two weeks later.

That’s nearly a third of the city’s electorate. 

The Wire has found that the 47.56 lakh names deleted from the list are predominantly working-age men in transient or informal housing, disproportionately migrant workers from Poorvanchal and, on every demographic marker available, blue collar job seekers rather than the settled middle class. This is borne out by testing the data with sex ratio numbers, the age profile, the categories and the surnames.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has released the Absent, Shifted, Duplicate and Deceased (ASDD) list for all 14,947 booths across 70 assembly constituencies. Each name comes with an EPIC number, a relation type and relation name, the position the person held on the previous roll, their exact age, their sex, and one of four reasons an officer entered against them.

To analyse the exercise, The Wire downloaded all 14,947 documents and categorised them. The documents give each person’s exact age, so the 31 to 60 bracket used throughout this piece comes from there. The surname figures come from counting how often each name appears.

More men off the list

Taking an average across all 70 assembly constituencies, 56.78% of the names removed from the list are men, against 43.21% women. 

The overall sex ratios of the voter list make this even clearer: Delhi’s roll had 882 women for every 1,000 men when the exercise began. In the SIR, 747 women were deleted for every 1,000 men deleted. In Okhla, 63.68% of the removals were men. In Tughlakabad 61.71%, Moti Nagar 61.51%, and Sangam Vihar, 60.91%.

For anyone familiar with Delhi’s urban informal economy, this is perhaps not a surprise. The city’s migrant workforce is overwhelmingly male. Blue-collar job seekers come to the city alone and register at a transient address, a rented room or a bed at a work site, while the family stays in the home state. When the work moves on, a voter registration might be left behind at an address nobody........

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