Dead for Parliament, Alive for Panchayats: 1.82 Lakh Rajasthan Voters Expose the Fragility of ECI’s SIR Under Gyanesh Kumar
Nearly 1.82 lakh citizens in Rajasthan were declared dead by the Election Commission of India (ECI) during its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) yet remain alive and eligible to vote on the State Election Commission’s (SEC) rolls for ongoing panchayat elections. An investigation by The Reporters’ Collective, published on November 7, 2026, matched the ECI’s Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) lists against the SEC’s panchayat electoral rolls and identified 1,82,440 such individuals. The highest numbers appear in Garhi assembly constituency (4,889) and Sirohi (4,624).
The ECI’s SIR exercise, conducted between October 2025 and February 2026, classified roughly 8.75 lakh people as dead in Rajasthan and produced a net deletion of about 31.36 lakh names, reducing the electorate from 5.46 crore to 5.15 crore in the final roll published on February 21, 2026. The SEC’s parallel revision for local bodies, locked within days of the ECI’s final publication, independently verified many of the same individuals as living. The two commissions maintain separate rolls—one for Parliament and Assembly, the other for panchayats and municipalities—but the gap on a basic fact of life and death is not a minor administrative variance. It is a direct challenge to the ECI’s claim of rigorous, uniform verification.
Queries sent by the investigators to both the ECI and the Rajasthan SEC went unanswered. Booth-level officers contacted for the story denied that any person marked dead under SIR remained on the panchayat roll, a claim contradicted by the EPIC-number matching. An earlier PUCL study had already shown that more than 26 lakh names deleted during the SIR continued to appear on the SEC’s 2026 local body lists. Permanent migration was cited as the reason for a large share of removals, yet the scale of the “dead” category that survives on another official roll raises questions about the quality of evidence used to strike names.
Opposition parties, particularly the Congress in Rajasthan, have long alleged that the SIR produced wrongful deletions, pressure on booth-level officers, and selective targeting. Nationally, leaders have described the exercise as generating large-scale exclusions under the ASDD category and have demanded greater transparency from the Commission led by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The Rajasthan numbers supply a concrete, quantifiable example: voters barred from parliamentary and Assembly elections because the ECI has ruled them dead can still cast ballots in panchayat polls if they are, as the SEC has determined, alive. The investigation did not conduct ground verification in every case, but a discrepancy of nearly two lakh people is large enough to affect outcomes and to test the credibility of the “purified” rolls.
The absence of any public reconciliation, joint audit, or explanation from the ECI leaves two incompatible versions of the same citizenry. Under Gyanesh Kumar, the Commission has presented the SIR as a necessary clean-up to protect electoral integrity. When an independent cross-check with another constitutional election authority produces a mismatch of this magnitude—and when neither body responds to questions—the claim of reliability becomes harder to sustain. Until the ECI accounts for the discrepancy, documents the evidence used to declare voters dead, and aligns its data with state commissions, the trustworthiness of the revised rolls remains open to challenge. The Rajasthan case is not an isolated clerical error; it is a measurable test of the Commission’s integrity that has so far gone unanswered.
