NEW DELHI: India`s sweeping overhaul of electoral rolls has triggered a political firestorm, with opposition parties accusing the election commission of putting millions at risk of disenfranchisement.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), launched in June last year, aims to purge electoral rolls of `duplicate, deceased and otherwise ineligible` voters.

Critics, however, say the exercise has shifted the burden of proof onto voters,fore-ing millions to establish their eligibility and raising the risk of wrongful exclusion.

Thousands have held protests in the capital this month calling for the resignation of the chief election commissioner over accusations that the rolls have been manipulated to benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) rejects the allegations, saying the revision complies with the law and that omis-sion from a draft roll does not amount to permanent deletion.

What makes the exercise extraordinary? Nearly 650 million of the 960m registered voters cast their ballot in the last general election in 2024.

Election rolls are routinely updated to reflect deaths, address changes and newly eligible voters.

But the SIR goes much further, requiring the entire electorate to re-establish their cre-dentials by filling out extra forms and providing documentation linking them to old electoral rolls.

`This procedure is entirely different from what has been done in the past,` former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa said.

`The methodology followed has been of physical door-to-door verification. It was never that you asked people wholesale to establish their eligibility all over again even after they have beenadmitted to the rolls through the prescribed due process.

Transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj said the process disproportionately burdens marginalised voters who often struggle to produce documents.

`The crisis of documents is the biggest crisis the poor face in most cases,` she said.

`Women, minorities, people living at the margins and the poorest were the worst hit by this exercise because they`re the ones who find it very diffi-cult to produce documents which can prove their citizenship.

How many voters have been affected? More than 133m names were excluded from revised electoral rolls, according to figures reported by Indian media and cited by opposition parties in court filings.

The ECI disputes the characterisation of those cases as confirmed deletions, saying eligible voters remain entitled toapply for inclusion on the roll.

According to an ECI breakdown, around 28m entries were classified as belonging to deceased voters and 10.4m as duplicates, while millions of others were marked as absent, shifted or untraceable.

The data does not specify how many voters were ultimately found to be ineligible.

`If the intention was to remove ineligible people, then they must say how many ineligible people were found, Lavasa said.-AFP