India is nowhere near ready for a nationwide SIR. A passport scare showed me why

Are you a citizen of India? And can you prove it?

These are two questions that are becoming increasingly urgent for everyone in this country. They are questions the government is asking people with increasing frequency, in various ways. If you want to get a sense of whether you, dear reader, can answer these questions in the affirmative, read on.

I was asked the question recently. I have held Indian passports for the past 33 years, since 1993. As someone born in India before 1987, I am a citizen of India by birth. Additionally, both my parents are Indian citizens. My passport was last renewed in 2022 under the Tatkal scheme, which provides for police verification after the passport is issued. I received a letter from the Regional Passport Office (RPO) last month, four years after the passport was issued, informing me that the police had now turned in an adverse report for “citizenship not established”. I would have to visit the RPO within 21 days to establish my citizenship, failing which my passport would be automatically cancelled.

I have since gone through the required re-verification process successfully.

The first thing one is reminded of when going through the grind in Indian government offices, police stations and even hospitals is the sheer bureaucratic nightmare of it all.

Long queues of people snake through narrow corridors and out of dilapidated buildings. Disinterested guards imperiously order harassed people about. The signage is minimal. Only a few people – employees or regulars – walk confidently about; everyone else seems lost, like rats in a maze, unsure where to go or what to do. People ask one another. Someone says one thing, someone else says another. Reaching the correct clerk’s window becomes a test of navigation skills and endurance. It is a process that can easily take a few hours, or the better part of a day.

Then, when you reach the window, your real test begins.

The non-VIP grind

This general national experience, in which everyone except the most privileged Indians partakes, repeated itself as I did the rounds of the passport office and police stations. The privileged VIPs never stand in a queue for anything – not even at temples, because they are VIPs even before God.

I am not a VIP. At the RPO in Kolkata, I found myself in a queue in a small, overcrowded room with several desks, behind which sat obviously harried employees facing even more anxious applicants. Outside in the corridor, a woman sat weeping loudly in evident frustration.

The man at the counter, after checking online that my name was still on the electoral rolls, took my passport into “safe custody”. My file would go back to the police for re-verification, he informed me. He had done the same with the person ahead of me in the queue; it looked like the standard procedure. Why the adverse police report questioning my citizenship had come in the first place, years after the passport was issued, remained a mystery.

Some people have asked me if it might be because of something I wrote. In our “mother of democracy,” these days, such doubts tend to arise in people's minds. However, I have not been a full-time journalist for years. I write the occasional analysis, op-ed or book review, which hardly seems sufficient to warrant any special attention.

The police re-verification that I went through felt routine. One night, a phone call from an unknown number summoned me to the police station with my documents. I again found myself in a queue of people sweating profusely in the heat and humidity in a narrow corridor. They had come for routine police verification for their passport applications; unlike me, they were not there for re-verification. The documents I was asked for were largely the same as those of the person immediately before me in the queue. It seemed like the usual ask, at least in West Bengal now.

A long list of documents

It was a challenging list.

I was asked for a copy of my passport, my Aadhaar card, voter ID (and whether my name is still in the electoral rolls), birth certificate, class 10 board examination certificate, current electricity bill bearing the same address as the one on my passport, my father’s passport or voter ID, and my mother’s passport or voter ID.

I fortunately have all of these. My name is still on the electoral rolls and so are my parents’. However, I can imagine that this kind of documentation test is not one that a lot of Indians would pass.

Birth registration did not become routine in India until after the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, came into force. At the time, more than 80 percent of the Indian population still lived in rural areas, often in places that did not have hospitals or even primary health centres. For years afterwards, millions upon millions of people continued to be born in places where registration simply did not happen. Childbirths took place at home, not in hospitals, and babies were delivered by midwives.

Such people wouldn’t have birth certificates to begin with.

The vast majority of Indians born a few decades ago wouldn’t have class 10 certificates either. In the 1981 Census, only 43.5 percent of the population was recorded as literate – but literacy essentially meant being able to read and write one’s own name in any language. The percentage of people who had passed class 10 at the time was less than 10 percent of the population. In other words, 90 percent wouldn’t have a class 10 certificate.

The percentage of Indians who currently hold passports is about 7 percent. The fraction of the population that can produce their parents’ passports in addition to their own is vanishingly small.

The electricity bill in one’s own name is a privilege enjoyed only by those who own property. If you live in rented accommodation, you have to produce the electricity bill along with a rent deed.

That brings me to the final two: voter ID and Aadhaar.

These are the two documents that most Indians are likely to have. According to a release from the Government of India’s Press Information Bureau, more than 99 percent of electors possess an Election Photo Identity Card, and more than 99 percent of adults have an Aadhaar card.

Aadhaar is proof of what?

However, with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls now underway in 19 states and union territories across India, the number of those with voter IDs is likely to come down in the days to come. The SIR in Bengal, which was conducted differently from other states, struck off the names of approximately 91 lakh people. Of these, 34 lakh people appealed against the deletions.

On the face of it, the SIR process is simple. In actual practice, as many people have discovered – or are now discovering – something as minor as a spelling error in a voter list or in a document issued to their father decades ago can lead to major problems. For example, a South Indian friend whose father’s name was misspelled with an “m” instead of an “n” in the 2002 voter list described running the gauntlet of government offices to get it corrected, with no success.

The revision exercise is meant to weed out people who have moved house for any reason, or who work in a town or city other than the one on their voter card. On social media, soldiers posted away from home wondered what would happen to them. Parents whose children are studying abroad are concerned about whether their children will pass the SIR test.

The solution is to move your vote to your current address by filling Form 8, or register afresh at your new address using Form 6. Theoretically, this process can be used even for someone with a spelling mistake in the name in the 2002 list. Simple, right?

Except that nothing is ever simple when it comes to such exercises.

The list of documents mentioned on the Election Commission of India (ECI) website for establishing identity and address includes Aadhaar. In fact, for online submission, Aadhaar-based verification is mandatory. However, on the ground, in West Bengal, those submitting forms using Aadhaar are finding their applications stuck or rejected. The reason: while the ECI website still lists Aadhaar as an accepted document, sources say staff downstream have been instructed – at least in West Bengal – to reject applications that use Aadhaar as proof of address.

There are long queues of people clutching documents, sweating in the narrow corridors of municipal and block development offices across the state. The process of re-entry into the electoral rolls, according to an estimate recently cited by the Calcutta High Court, will take 21 years to conclude at the present pace.

The court was hearing the case of a man whose passport application was denied on the ground that his name is not in the SIR. It held that his “citizenship question” must be decided first before his passport can be issued – which might take more than 21 years.

The mess we are in

As the regime of citizenship tests becomes more universal, every Indian will face the burden of proving they belong sooner or later. Doing so will not be easy for many an Indian citizen because of historical gaps in documentation, whether at the national or personal level. The country that did not give millions of people birth certificates until well after 1970 is now increasingly asking everyone to produce them. The country where more than 90 percent of the population had not passed class 10 in 1981 is now asking people for class 10 certificates.

More mundane issues can also affect even the well-educated and well-documented.

Did you lose your voter ID years ago and never get a replacement? Trouble. Name change in your documents due to marriage or your parents’ divorce and remarriage? Problem. Different addresses across different documents? Hassle. Name not in the 2002 electoral rolls? Could be an issue. Neither you nor your father’s name in the 2002 electoral rolls? Definitely an issue. Your father’s name misspelled in the 2002 electoral rolls? Problem. NRI with no one living at your passport address in India? Bro, you’ve got issues.

The list of things that can trip up the average Indian citizen and keep his or her name off the voter rolls is long. The level of tech-savviness required to submit applications online and track them through apps is beyond what many elderly, poor or less educated citizens can reasonably navigate. Running around government offices and spending hours or even days waiting in queues takes time and effort that most working people cannot afford. These offices are not open on weekends or after office hours; you have to take time off work yourself. The chances of getting everything done in a single visit are close to zero if there is any problem or gap in your documentation.

The SIR is an ambitious exercise to “clean up” the electoral rolls. But if the process of hearing claims of those struck off the list for some documentation issue or other is going to take 21 years – as in West Bengal – then is it a fair process?

Improving the bureaucratic infrastructure that would enable citizens to comply with what is being asked of them without needless difficulty and confusion should have preceded this massive exercise.

Twenty-five years ago, most airports in India looked and smelt rather like bus stations do today. They have since improved drastically, and their capacity to handle large volumes of traffic has increased tenfold or more. Indian highways have likewise improved and now handle much larger volumes of traffic at speeds that were once unimaginable. In the same vein, the infrastructure, manpower and systems of government offices needed to be improved drastically before undertaking an exercise on the scale of a nationwide SIR – one that will affect the lives of millions.

The writer is an author, journalist and academic.

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