Twenty years after SIR 2003, India’s voter roll remains vulnerable to errors, opacity, and manipulation. Genuine reform requires a transparent, auditable system, verifiable data trails, and enforceable penalties for malpractice. Unless SIR evolves from incremental fixes to structural accountability, the Yaksha’s question will continue to question India’s electoral credibility — who is accountable when systemic flaws and delays corrode democracy?
Electoral Roll Integrity
The electoral roll is the foundation of democratic legitimacy. Every rightful inclusion or exclusion determines the fairness of elections. With India’s electorate nearing a billion, managing this dynamic database, shaped daily by births, deaths, and migrations, is a formidable task.
The ECI, mandated to ensure free and fair elections, relies on manual processes and digital tools. Yet each election exposes recurring issues, wrongful deletions, duplicates, ghost voters, and delayed updates. These are not mere administrative lapses but symptoms of structural weaknesses in electoral roll management.
While digital tools such as ECI-Net and e-sign verified processes mark progress in form, they fall short in spirit. Like the Yaksha’s timeless question in the Mahabharata, today’s challenge is accountability — who is responsible when systemic flaws erode fairness? Two decades of missed reforms and bureaucratic inertia have made verifiable transparency, technical integrity, and moral responsibility urgent. Without them, India risks retaining the appearance of democracy while losing its essence — public trust.
The 2003 SIR: Vision, Fragmentation, and the Erosion of Accountability
Electoral roll management in India has long suffered from ad hocism — piecemeal corrections, inconsistent verifications, and hurried revisions before elections. These short-term fixes leave recurring gaps and undermine public trust.
The SIR, initiated in 2003 during the tenure of Magsaysay Award-winning CEC J. M. Lyngdoh and under the visionary leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a defining attempt to break this cycle. It emerged during digitisation, alongside the adoption of EVMs and the ECI-Net for database consolidation. Yet the fundamental challenge persisted — ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the electoral roll, the bedrock of democratic legitimacy.
What began as visionary reform soon lost coherence amid bureaucratic rigidity and fragmented responsibilities. Instead of evolving into a transparent, integrated system, SIR was reduced to a series of partial digital measures — ECI-Net, ERONet, and NVSP — each solving a fragment of the problem but never addressing the system as a whole. The result is progress in technology but stagnation in transparency.
At the operational level, the BLO, ERO, and DEO form the backbone of electoral administration; the BLO verifies voter data, the ERO finalises constituency rolls, and the DEO ensures district-wide accuracy. However, weak training, limited resources, complacency, and poor accountability distort data. Manual inputs and non-verified digital updates widen the gap between ground reality and the central database, compounded by the absence of independent audits or public scrutiny.
In this context, the Yaksha’s question resurfaces — can piecemeal technology substitute for institutional courage? Two decades later, the unfulfilled promise of SIR reflects not just administrative delay but the erosion of accountability itself. What began as reform has devolved into a cycle of recurring corrections — a paradox where technology is celebrated even as transparency quietly fades.
Why SIR Failed to Deliver
The 2003 SIR blueprint envisioned transparency, auditability, and cross-verification mechanisms linking administrative accountability with public oversight. Yet implementation through technological upgrades remained fragmented.
The paradox is stark: technology advanced, trust did not. The system’s fragility is evident in recurring failures, mass deletions of legitimate voters, delayed inclusion of eligible citizens, and allegations of selective manipulation, including unchecked additions of illegal migrants due to flawed verification. Every election repeats the same cycle, draining public trust and resources. There has been a sharp and unexplained rise in voter numbers in several border constituencies. Despite concerns over the inclusion of ineligible migrants, no systematic effort was undertaken to identify or remove them. Visible irregularities persist, while cleansing mechanisms remain absent. Weak verification and opaque systems have become a pattern of Systemic Issues Repeated (SIR).
At its core, SIR’s failure is not technological but cultural and institutional. Bureaucracies guard their turf, political actors protect self-interest, and accountability fades into ambiguity. The reform that could have redefined democratic credibility remains trapped between intent and inertia, leaving the Yaksha’s question unanswered — who is accountable when the guardians resist reform?
Towards Genuine Electoral Integrity
If the e-sign process represents a procedural step, genuine electoral integrity demands a complete architectural redesign that unites technology, transparency, and trust. Democracy’s credibility depends not on episodic corrections but on continuous accountability. What India needs is not incremental reform but systemic integrity engineering. The path forward lies in systemic transparency, not token upgrades. The Election Commission, the State, political parties, and citizens must share responsibility for electoral integrity.
Ultimately, electoral legitimacy rests on public trust. When voters find their names missing or voter lists inflated, confidence in democracy erodes. Restoring that trust requires more than technical patches; it calls for a transparent, auditable, and inclusive system that guarantees: (i) Accuracy — every eligible voter included, every ineligible excluded, (ii) Transparency — processes open to verification and scrutiny, and (iii) Fairness, no group disproportionately affected by errors. Above all, institutional opacity must yield to ethical accountability. Trust is not an accessory to democracy; it is its very foundation. The Yaksha’s question endures because its essence is timeless — when power is dispersed, responsibility must deepen. Building a robust, digitally accountable ecosystem is the only way to ensure India’s electoral process remains efficient and unassailable.
Restoring trust requires more than technology, it demands political will and institutional courage. The ECI must move beyond ritualistic corrections and adopt genuine structural reforms that ensure accountability. Instead of treating the process as adversarial, political parties and civil society must work collaboratively to make the system efficient and equitable.
A reimagined SIR should function as an Integrity Loop — every update, whether deletion, inclusion, or modification, generates an auditable trail; every trail invites oversight; and every layer of oversight strengthens trust. When such a self-correcting, transparent feedback system is institutionalised, the Yaksha’s timeless question — who is accountable? And finally finds a credible answer.
The writer is a Tech-Education Policy Consultant and a former Professor of Computer Science at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and JNU
