The Election Commission of India (ECI) recently issued an order for holding Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls for Bihar. This exercise will then be carried out in all the States. The order is antithetical to the tradition of this august institution. From the first election held in independent India, the ECI has played a heroic role in seeding democracy through active voter enrolment and protection of the right to vote of the disadvantaged.
Though the ECI is facing a credibility crisis of late, this initiative is surprisingly radical. And unless it is substantially modified, it will disproportionately disenfranchise the poor and deprived electors irrespective of their party preference. We will leave the thorny questions of legality to the experts and just focus on the scale of the venture and its practicability within the proposed timeline.
As per the directive, all individuals who have not been featured in the electoral rolls of 2003 need to prove their citizenship as per the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, and Rules. Broadly, if the 2003 electoral roll features nearly all individuals who were 18 years or older then, these individuals, now 40 years and older, get a direct entry into the proposed electoral roll. How many then have to go through the hoops?
The affected population
In 2020, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare published a report, Population Projections for India and States 2011-36. The report estimates the current voting age population of Bihar to be 8.08 crore. About 59% of this population (4.76 crore individuals) is 40 years old and under. The ECI, from July 1 to July 31, requires this staggering number to prove citizenship.
In its press note of June 28, the ECI stated that the electorate count in Bihar is 7.9 crore. As per the ECI, as “4.96 crore of the 7.9 crore already have their names in the last intensive revision of electoral rolls” in 2003, just 2.94 crore individuals will need to submit their eligibility documents.
This is clearly an oversight. The electoral roll of 2003 for Bihar did have around 4.96 crore individuals. By our calculations from the reports of the Sample Registration System, around 1.1 crore of them are dead. The ECI has taken them off the rolls.
Plus, there is sizeable number of people who have permanently migrated out of Bihar. As per a paper by Pinak Sarkar, Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, deriving from the Census, 93 lakh people permanently migrated out of Bihar between 2001 and 2011. Even if migration has slowed a bit after 2011, an average of 8 lakh out-migrants a year from Bihar in the period 2003-24 would mean a total of 1.76 crore out-migrants.
If the share of those over 18 years of age in the 1.76 crore group is the same as the proportion in the Bihar population, this amounts to 94 lakh voters who have migrated out of Bihar permanently. If even one fourth of them remain electors in Bihar, 70 lakh are no longer electors in Bihar and are voting elsewhere in India. The ECI would have taken them off the Bihar electoral rolls.
Hence, of the 4.96 crore electors in the 2003 list, if we remove those who are dead and those who have migrated from Bihar permanently, around 3.16 crore electors remain in the present count of Bihar’s electorate. These 3.16 crore people who were also on the 2003 list do not need to submit any eligibility documents. The rest of the 4.74 crore individuals (7.9 crore-3.16 crore) need to submit their documents.
This figure is very similar to our 4.76 crore estimate based on population projections. The ECI requires this staggering magnitude to prove its eligibility to vote within a month.
Proof of citizenship
What is this proof of eligibility? The ECI says a copy of one document in a list of 11 needs to be presented. Seems simple? Perhaps for some other State, but certainly not for a document-scarce State such as Bihar. Let us list the 11 documents and look at the data that is publicly available for our demographic of 18-40 years.
The first is identity card/pension card of State government/ Central government/public sector undertaking. As per the 2022 caste census, 20.47 lakh Biharis have government jobs. Fewer than half of them will be from the 18-40 age group and pertain to less than 2% of this group.
The second is an identity card issued before July 1, 1987. This is not applicable.
The third is a birth certificate. As per the National Family Health Survey-3, 2.8% of Bihar’s population born between 2001 and 2005 possess a birth certificate. Much of our age group of interest was born before 2001, so a negligible proportion possesses this document.
The fourth is a passport. Around 2.4% of Bihar’s population possess a passport. The share would be higher in the 20-40 age group but would not reach double digits.
The fifth is a matriculation certificate. Deriving from the National Family Health Survey-2 and National Family Health Survey-5, around 45-50% of 18-40-year-olds are matriculate. As of 2019-20, there is a 10% point gap overall between male matriculates and female matriculates: females are at a definite disadvantage
The sixth is domicile. In-migrants in Bihar are an insignificant proportion of the population.
The seventh is a forest rights certificate. The share of Scheduled Tribes (ST) in Bihar is 1.3%, according to the 2011 Census. Of them, those living in forests form a much lower share.
The eighth is an Other Backward Classes (OBC)/Scheduled Castes (SC)/ST certificate. Data from the India Human Development Survey-2, analysed by Professor Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran in The India Forum, notes that around 20% of SCs, 18% of OBCs, and 38% STs had a caste certificate. Considering that almost no upper castes possess caste certificates, around 16% of Biharis possessed a caste certificate in 2011-12 when this survey was conducted.
Those eligible individuals who are 30-40 years of age today would already have obtained a caste certificate by 2012 had they wished; even if the rest obtain caste certificates in a higher proportion, overall not more than one in four households are likely to possess this document.
The ninth is the National Register of Citizens. This is applicable solely to Assam.
The tenth is the family register. This is also not applicable to Bihar.
The last is a land/house allotment certificate by the government. There is no data available on land allotment certificates. House allotment certificates seem applicable to government employees availing government housing. No such certificate is given to beneficiaries of schemes such as the Pradhan Mantra Gram Awas Yojana.
Most people without a matriculation certificate are unlikely to apply for a passport, a government job, or a caste certificate. By the ECI’s new rule, the matriculation certificate has effectively become the main eligibility proof for voters aged 18 to 40. This shifts us from adult franchise to a system that favours only matriculates. As a result, around 2.4 crore-2.6 crore people who had to leave school due to poverty may now be left out of the voters’ list.
The final number of people disenfranchised will be even larger than this if we add the over 40-year-olds who have been missed in the 2003 voters’ list and those over 40 whose present names don’t match with those in the 2003 voting list. These hundreds of lakhs of people will lose their constitutional right to vote not because they are illegal migrants but because they are illegible to a State which lacked the capacity to issue birth certificates, render basic education, or issue caste certificates to the deprived castes. A State cannot penalise so many people for its own shortcomings.
Why not Aadhaar?
This also begs a simple question: if the ECI allows for OBC/SC/ST certificates, why is Aadhaar not allowed if the proof of identity document for a caste certificate is Aadhaar? It should not be that Aadhaar’s major flaw is that it is more available — around 9/10th of the Bihar population possess it. Does the ECI believe that it has issued voter cards to non-citizens? Also, why not allow ration cards?
Yet, even if the list of allowable documents is modified to be more inclusive, the project will disenfranchise people or become a bureaucratic waste because of the sheer paucity of time.
Let us suppose that all the 4.76 crore who are asked to submit documents do so: that is, on an average, 1.95 lakh per constituency. Each constituency has one electoral registration officer (ERO) who has numerous other important duties. (The ECI website has no information on there being any assistant EROs in Bihar.) In the 62 days between July 1 and August 31, they have to scrutinise almost 2 lakh applications, prepare a draft roll, issue a notice, and launch a suo moto enquiry to each elector whose eligibility is doubted. That is a superhuman task.
Rahul Shastri is a researcher associated with Bharat Jodo Abhiyan