Aftab is one of the 728 electors in Bela Estate who has been removedBefore 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.

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