In Bihar, over 1,000 voters in a single house that doesn’t exist

There are 1,069 voters in a polling booth in Rahijagatpur village, Bihar’s Madhepura district. Each of them is listed under a single house. The voters may be real; the house is not.

This phantom home in Bihariganj assembly is the starkest instance of voter clustering in the state. But it’s hardly unique. 

Across Bihar, 2,243 such addresses exist – each with at least 100 voters, and over a 100 of them with more than 500 voters. This is despite the Election Commission’s months-long “special intensive revision” meant to “purify” electoral rolls. In fact, only 25 of the state’s 243 assemblies are without such clusters.

The EC’s response to these findings points to an institutional failure. 

The Bihar Chief Electoral Officer had dismissed a report published by Newslaundry about 14 such cases as “misleading”. Yet, a senior EC official now admits the problem and that it had come to the commission’s notice “after” the SIR. Moreover, the official claimed, “it was beyond the scope of the commission’s legal powers” to correct such addresses during the revision.

The mess in Bihariganj’s Rahijagatpur runs deeper than a clerical lapse. 

Many rural homes in Bihar are missing proper postal addresses: either due to non-standard formats or due to inadequate documentation in revenue or other records. Rahijagatpur is replete with such incomplete addresses, but of its three booths, only one has the bizarre cluster. 

Why?

During the 2011 census, temporary house numbers were assigned in the village, but some villagers in the polling booth claimed they never displayed them. When booth-level officials later compiled electoral rolls, they neither knew the census numbers nor were adequately trained to implement the EC’s own safeguard – assigning notional addresses where none exist. This guideline, buried as a mere footnote in the latest SIR instructions, was not adequately implemented. 

So instead of distinct numbers, one polling booth in Rahijagatpur ended up with a single “house number 3”, with 1,069 voters inside.

Reached for comment, the Electoral Registration Officer in-charge of the assembly and Udaikishunganj Sub Divisional Officer Pankaj Kumar Ghosh said he will “look into it” and respond.

Newslaundry has reached out to the Bihar CEO for comment. We also reached out to 10 other officials in the Bihar CEO’s office, including the spokesperson, but they refused to comment. A questionnaire has been sent to the CEO. This report will be updated if a response is received.

The constellations of voters

An analysis of 90,000 booths in the state suggests such clusters are not insignificant in scale.

For instance, booth number 161 in Barachatti assembly has the second biggest cluster of 947 voters registered on the same address: house number 6 in Nidani. Eight addresses, each in a different assembly, have 800 to 900 voters. There are 18 addresses with 700 to 800 voters, 33 with 600 to 700 voters, 64 with 500 to 600 voters, and 89 clusters with 400 to 500 voters. Around 2,241 addresses have 100 to 800 voters. 

Importantly, addresses on all these voter lists do not even mention ward numbers, a mandatory field as per the EC’s instructions and identifiers within an electoral division within a panchayat area. These could have also helped differentiate one house number from another in the same village. 

Such clusters are denser in some constituencies.

Nawada leads the chart with 102 common addresses accommodating 19,455 voters, including one cluster with a staggering 478 residents. Next is Matihani, where 13,918 voters are registered on just 50 addresses, with one address alone hosting 880 individuals. Aurangabad follows, tallying 12,486 electors across 49 addresses, and its largest grouping recording 686 voters. Bihariganj and Digha each have 11,617 people registered on 34 addresses, with the maximum occupancy of a single address reaching 430.

Division-wise, Magadh and Patna have the most clusters. These are the same regions with the highest number of voters with house number ‘0’. 

In Rahijagatpur, ‘no concept of house numbers’ in only 1 booth

Located in northeastern Bihar, Rahijagatpur village is dominated by OBC voters who work as farm workers. It has three polling booths, but only one of them has the issue of voter clustering.

Among those listed on the same address is 74-year-old Kasharani Devi, who lives under a shed and was surprised to know she was tagged along with hundreds of others on a single address. Just like Pankaj Kumar, a 50-year-old, who lives in a pucca house.

But Kumar explained why the problem may have persisted. 

“Some years ago, at the time when the last census was conducted, cards were distributed with our house numbers written on it, which was meant to be pasted on the entrance of our houses. But most people never put it up. I can not even remember what house number was given to me. Because we don’t use them,” he said.

Sandip Kumar, the village mukhiya, said, “We never had the concept of using house numbers”. “Now, because you have pointed out I am wondering how come even these house numbers came into existence in the voter list.”

Sandeep Kumar, who has served as the BLO of booth 219 – which has 1,069 voters on a single address – since 2005, claimed that allotment of no standard addresses is at the heart of this problem. 

“All voters clustered under house number 3 have appeared in the voter lists well before I took up this post. Over the years, the problem has been amplified. As the new voters came in, they were also allotted the same address because their family members were also already marked on this address. And now the same issue has made its way to the voter lists even after the SIR.”

The lack of non-standardised addresses is a challenge that plagues many parts of the country. Despite Aadhaar, the problem persists. The government is trying to roll out a digital solution – a 14-digit “Unique Land Parcel Identification Number”.

It is because of this problem that the EC has made a provision for notional addresses.

Nitesh Kumar Mandal, BLO of one of the other two booths that have listed different families on different house numbers, said the officer before him had done a “good job”. “Houses of voters in my booth also do not have house numbers. But the officer before me had done a good job assigning notional numbers.”

On June 24, when the Election Commission had announced its decision to conduct SIR in Bihar, the poll body had issued 19-page long instructions. But the instructions to tackle the issue of non-standardised addresses across the state was mentioned in a footnote. It said that where panchayat or municipal authorities have not given a house number, the local poll officials will give a notional number. Importantly, in every such case, the voter rolls have to indicate that the house number is notional. These addresses should begin with the number 1, as per a 2011 EC training module for BLOs.

But in Rahijagatpur, 1,069 voters exist on house number 3, with no indication that this is a notional address.

Despite the instructions, BLO Kumar said he was not able to implement these due to two reasons. “Firstly, I was not aware of it. Neither our senior officials flagged it. Secondly, there was no option in the SIR to correct these house numbers.”

In the first phase of SIR that led to the draft rolls, house-to-house verification was carried out with enumeration forms that had the addresses already printed as they were in the previous rolls. This is how improper addresses made their way to the draft rolls.

Confirming the same to Newslaundry, the senior EC official quoted above said, “In an intensive revision exercise, it is beyond the legal powers of the EC to make changes to addresses or any other detail of a voter on its own. There are only two ways to correct this. One, we decide to prepare the rolls from scratch in which we will enter all the details of all voters fresh. The second way is that voters fill form 8 to get their addresses changed.”

“Earlier in intensive revision exercises, we used to prepare fresh rolls from scratch. But because this intensive revision was not much different from how a regular revision exercise is conducted every year, therefore it continues to have these issues.”

Impact on verification

The absence of unique identifiers in the notional addresses assigned to these voters poses a significant challenge for BLOs attempting physical verification – the very backbone of voter roll purification. 

BLO Kumar explained that the lack of distinct addresses complicates verification. “Not all of these 1,069 voters actually reside in the same hamlet…One may be in this ward and another in a completely different ward. Naturally, trying to trace their locations during physical verification becomes a difficult task.”

Arun Kumar, a BLO in Bodh Gaya assembly, echoed the same concern. “The BLO before me assigned the same notional number to all voters, which resulted in over 800 people in my booth being clubbed under a single address. I’ve raised this issue with senior poll officials multiple times, highlighting how it complicates physical verification. If I try to fix it by giving new voters from the same family a unique notional number, they end up reassigned to a different polling booth since voter lists are sorted by serial numbers. Yet, I’ve never received a workable solution. Even after the extensive SIR exercise, this fundamental problem remains unresolved,” he claimed.

Acknowledging the challenges faced by the BLOs, the senior EC official said, “We believe that a sizeable chunk of the population, which is about 70 to 80 percent, do not have proper addresses. If you ask today, we don’t even know how many of them we have allotted notional addresses because we never made a distinction of notional numbers in the voter rolls clearly. Moreover, the physical verification of voters becomes a far bigger challenge in urban areas because people in cities hardly know each other as compared to rural India, where everyone knows everyone.”

When asked if the commission had considered to course correct its allocation of notional numbers in Bihar, he replied, “The only solution we are left with is that we visit all the houses again and ask voters to fill a form 8 to get their addresses modified.”

Vishal Vaibhav is a former assistant professor at the IIT-Delhi department of physics.

Hemant K Pandey is a Delhi-based independent journalist.

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