Before Delhi's Special Intensive Revision, one booth covering part of Bela Estate — a jhuggi-jhopri cluster on the Yamuna floodplains in Zone O — had 729 registered voters. When the draft roll was published in August, it retained just one name: a 99.8 percent deletion rate at this single booth.

The booth was part 38 of Chandni Chowk, a seat that saw nearly 38 percent of its electorate struck off in the draft roll. The JJ cluster that has this booth is on the western bank of the Yamuna river.

What makes the Special Intensive Revision in the area more curious are allegations that the exercise here relied not on the usual eligibility criteria – citizenship, age, residence, or disqualification under law due to election-linked offences. According to some local accounts and at least one election official, names were deleted because of the nature of residence – that they lived in an “unauthorised” settlement on Delhi Development Authority land.

Sunil Kumar, Assistant Electoral Registration Officer, said the residents of Bela Estate have neither electricity nor water bills nor pakka houses, and that they live on agricultural land – unauthorised land, in his account, which is why the names were removed. “They don’t have an electricity bill or water bill. They don’t even have a house there. It’s an agricultural land, they are living in an unauthorised system. They can’t say they are proper residents so this is why their names were cut.” 

Asked why enumeration forms were distributed and collected in the first place, he said he would look into it.

The Booth Level Officer (BLO), Garima Arya, was far less specific about what had gone wrong. She denied signing any enumeration forms from the settlement, citing an unspecified problem: “I have not signed any enumeration forms there because there was some problem and I had conveyed that to my higher-ups. Now they are looking into the matter,” she said, without saying what the problem was. 

Her statement is hard to square with the record: the minutes of the booth level officer’s meeting with the booth level agent note that only a single enumeration form was collected from the settlement, yet Newslaundry saw at least 20 enumeration forms carrying her signature. Arya also said she no longer handles the area – a claim the AERO disputed, maintaining that she is still the BLO for the booth.

Kamal Lal, 39, a resident who said he had helped the BLO distribute and collect enumeration forms, alleged that Electoral Registration Officer Manoj Kumar had told residents during a ground visit that voters in the area could not be registered at all. Reached for comment, Kumar said that those who had been removed could apply to be registered as voters again – he did not say the area’s residents were barred from registration outright. Newslaundry has sent Kumar questions about the other allegations in this report and will update the story if a response is received.

Kamal Lal said that despite approaching both the BLO and the ERO, he and his family were still marked “permanently shifted”. 

‘I don’t know why I was the only one included’

Everyone in the settlement was removed from the roll except one person, Mahant Kanchan Giri. Reached for comment, Giri said he had no idea why he was the only one to be included in the draft roll. “I don’t know why I was the only one included. I just filled out the enumeration form and submitted it to the BLO after filling in the details,” he said. He lives alone.

Kanchan, 27, who is among those deleted, said no one told them. “Legal notices are issued now and then for vacating the area but there was no legal notice to inform us we were removed from the voter roll,” she said. Her father Padam Singh, mother Dhora Devi, brother and sister-in-law were all marked “permanently shifted”; Kanchan herself was logged as “absent/untraceable”. Her father sells kachoris from a cycle on the highway. 

Kanchan said the last time she saw the BLO was when Arya collected the enumeration form.

Sharda Devi, 74, voted in the 2025 assembly election. She was marked “permanently shifted”. “I fear they will clear out the jhuggi and dump us on the road.”

Kanya Kumar, 27, said she was removed despite filing her enumeration form on time. She and her husband Dhanshu were both listed as “permanently shifted”. “If the voter ID gets cancelled, there will be nothing but trouble. Everywhere you go, they ask for the voter ID.”

Mohammad Aftab, 36, and his family were struck off. “From passport, work, to welfare schemes, this will strip us of every right if our names are not included in the final roll,” he said.

What the rules say

The manual on electoral rolls, while detailing the determination of ordinary residence, notes that: “Homeless/the persons living in sheds/pavement dwellers, who do not possess any documentary proof of ordinary residence are eligible for enrolment in electoral roll, provided they are ordinarily residing there, irrespective of the fact whether that is a private property or pavement or an encroachment on government land.”

Under Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, the conditions for enrolment are age and “ordinary residence” in the constituency – a factual question, defined in Section 20, of where a person actually lives. Neither provision refers to land ownership, the legality of a settlement, or utility bills.

In fact, the Election Commission’s Form 6, used to apply for inclusion in the roll, states that necessary field verification shall be made even in cases of “homeless Indian citizens living in sheds or pavements having no documentary proof of ordinary residence,” provided they are otherwise eligible.

Amrita Johri, a transparency activist, said, “The eligibility of being a voter in India has nothing to do with whether I have access to electricity or whether I have access to water or not. The ECI should not concern itself with the legality or illegality of one’s place of residence. The right to vote is separate from all of these other things.”

The Delhi High Court affirmed that reading weeks before Bela Estate’s draft roll appeared, in Indu Prakash Singh v. State (NCT of Delhi). The court held that the ECI’s Manual on Electoral Rolls already permits homeless and demolition-displaced persons to be enrolled through field verification alone, without documentary proof of residence, and dismissed a plea for a separate facilitative mechanism on the ground that this safeguard was “adequate” and already in use.

Update: A day after this report was published, the ERO’s office issued a press statement, saying the BLO “correctly placed these electors in the ASDD list” since they “were no longer residing” at their registered address, citing “substantial changes” in the area. 

“It was observed that, in most cases, the address of the electors was recorded as ‘agriculture’, while house numbers were recorded only in respect of a few electors. The area covered under the said part is situated on the western bank of the river Yamuna. It appears that a substantial number of electors residing in the area were engaged in agricultural activities in and around the Yamuna Bank area. The agricultural activities/illegal cultivation in the said area were discontinued in 2021, and the dwelling units existing in the area were demolished in 2022-23. As a result, the physical and residential status of the area has undergone substantial changes since the preparation of the earlier electoral records.”

“As per the instructions for SIR, the BLO was required to undertake house-to- house visits for distribution of the enumeration forms to the electors at their registered address. Due to the demolition of the dwelling units, these electors were no longer residing at the registered address as mentioned in the electoral roll. Thus their status as “ordinary resident” as per section 20(7) of the RP Act, 1970 read with Instruction in manual of ER is changed. As such, as per the extant instructions, BLO has correctly placed these electors in the ASDD list.”

“As per provisions of ECI, in case name of any elector does not exist in the electoral roll, and he/she satisfies the eligibility conditions for registration in the electoral rolls as laid down under Section 19 of the Representation of People Act, 1950 and other Rules, may apply in Form-6 along with supporting documents prescribed by the ECI for inclusion of his/her name in the electoral roll at any time during the year.”

On September 29, Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, visited a jhuggi-jhopdi cluster in the Bela Estate area of the Chandni Chowk Assembly constituency, where the SIR exercise deleted all voters except one. 

Sharing a video of his interaction with residents of the jhuggi-jhopri who were excluded from the draft roll, Rahul Gandhi wrote on X that excluding voters’ names was “unjustified”. 

The Congress party leader wrote, “These people have been living here for decades. They have already voted in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the 2025 Delhi elections. In 2023, their homes were demolished – but they didn’t go anywhere; they’re still right here.”

“This isn’t SIR – this is a method of vote theft. From those who already have the least, their only power is being snatched away. Gyanesh Kumar will go. But the system that made him do this will also have to answer,” he added. 

Gandhi also noted that having a house or not has no bearing on the right to vote, and that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had earlier stated that enumerators could enter “house number 0” in the forms of homeless voters. Furthermore, he said he had raised this matter with the area Sub-Divisional Magistrate.

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