ON JULY 3, the All-India Feminist Alliance (‘ALIFA’) has written to the Election Commission of India (‘ECI’) raising concerns about the systematic decimation and large-scale erosion of women's voting rights in the context of the Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’) of electoral rolls, underway since 2025. Fifty signatories, including activists, advocates, law students, researchers and journalists from across the country, have appealed to ECI to ensure that no woman or transgender person is left out of the voter lists on account of systemic problems in the process.
According to the submission, “Women, transgender persons, and members of minority, especially Muslim communities, got deleted in greater percentages than their proportion in the population.” In states such as Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal, the group says the revised voter list has led to a substantial drop in the gender ratio recorded in the electoral rolls.
ALIFA, which is an initiative of National Alliance of People’s Movements, has framed its intervention around the “error of exclusion” principle in social policy and has advocated that revision processes must be designed to protect the most vulnerable and marginalized from being wrongly dropped, even at the cost of some administrative inconvenience.
Legal and procedural background
Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 empowers the ECI to direct a special revision of electoral rolls for any constituency, after recording reasons for doing so. Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar announced the nationwide SIR process in October 2025. In the first two phases, SIR covered 13 States and UTs covering nearly 59 crore electors. Post the exercise, there has been a decline of over 5 crore voters. In percentage terms, the electoral rolls have been reduced by over 10 per cent.
According to reports, women have emerged as a significant group excluded from the voter list. In West Bengal, for instance, almost 61.8 percent of voters deleted or placed under adjudication after the SIR are women.
According to a report by Article 14, Amina, a woman in her late 20s, was struck off the voter list because her name was not consistent across her documents. While her birth certificate and school records listed her as Amina Sheikh, her Aadhaar card, PAN card, bank account and Voter ID listed her as Amina Bibi. Amina had married in 2013 at the age of 15 and moved roughly 20 km from her natal home to her marital home. Though she was recorded in her father's household in the 2011 Census, she was not added to the voter list at her marital address until 2019. “Women take their husband's names after marriage. Doesn't the government know this?” she questioned.
Similarly, transgender persons have raised alarms regarding the SIR exercise. In a survey of 74 transgender and intersex individuals conducted across several districts in Karnataka, none of the respondents could identify the polling booth where they had voted in 2002 and a significant share reported being unable to access family records at all, having been disowned, forced to leave their homes, or having had personal documents destroyed after disclosing their gender identity.
According to Joyita Mondal, a trans woman and founder of the community organisation Dinajpur Notun Alo (Dinajpur New Light), at least 50 deletions had occurred within her community in Uttar Dinajpur alone, with many more cases marked under adjudication. She attributed this to one, an inability to travel back to native villages to retrieve documents, and two, mismatches between a person's Aadhaar name and other records following gender transition.
In this backdrop, ALIFA has set out nine broad recommendations for what it calls a “sincere midcourse correction” in Phase 3 of the SIR to reduce the deletions of women and transgender persons, in general and of the marginalised, minority communities and vulnerable groups.
Nine-point demands
I. ‘Move away from patrilineal proof of lineage’
The letter argues ECI has “adopted a patriarchal, patrilineal understanding” of eligibility that ignores women’s and transgender persons’ often troubled relationships with natal or marital families, and ignores people living outside conventional households like in shelters, orphanages, on the street, or in transit.
It has asked ECI to recognise alternative documents (marriage invitation cards, a woman’s name listed as a parent on a child’s birth or school certificate, etc.) for those who already hold Aadhaar or ration cards, and to create a fallback registration route for women.
“The ECI must specify alternative routes of documentation and approaches for migrant, homeless, displaced and mobile communities, instead of forcing individual women voters to run from pillar to post in search of proof,” the letter reads.
II. ‘Address transgender and gender-diverse persons’ specific barriers’
The letter asks ECI to treat name/gender mismatches as a structural and not individual problem, given that many transgender people entered the electoral rolls only after the 2014 NALSA judgment and remain at various stages of updating their documents. It calls for gazette notifications and transgender ID cards to be accepted as documentary proof. It has also suggested creating alternative linkage methods for those estranged from their families. Significantly, in the absence of rules under the new Transgender Amendment Act, 2026, the group has called for continued reliance on the self-determination principle upheld by the Supreme Court in 2014 and codified in the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.
III. ‘Extend the SIR timeline’
Significantly, the group has remarked that the compressed timelines in Phases 1 and 2 were “a major source of exclusions and errors,” leaving neither Booth Level Officers (‘BLOs’) nor voters, particularly women in poor, marginal and vulnerable communities. enough time to gather documents from distant natal homes.
It has called for written protocols, anti-discrimination training, travel support and helplines for BLOs, along with clear accountability for wrongful rejection or non-distribution of forms. Thoughtfully, it has also said that proper remuneration for their “immense efforts” should be set up.
IV. ‘Revisit the logical discrepancy criteria’
The letter takes particular aim at the practice of flagging a name change as a discrepancy that renders married women suspect. It has acknowledged that such changes are common under patriarchal custom.
It has also challenged the rule treating a mother-child age gap of 15 years or less as a suspect category, pointing to National Family Health Survey-3 data showing more than half of women were married before 18 and that roughly 1 in 6 women aged 15–19 had already begun childbearing.
V. ‘Institute gender-just inclusion measures’
“The ECI must ensure that all eligible women voters and transgender voters are brought back on the updated SIR list and no woman or transgender person is disenfranchised,” the letter states and has recommended setting up dedicated, gender-friendly desks for women and transgender persons at every stage of the SIR process and establishing non-partisan help desks at Electoral Registration, Assistant Electoral Registration Offices and Gram Panchayat “to enable women, transgender persons, migrant workers, survivors of domestic violence etc, to help with lineage tracking and alternate designated documents.”
VI. ‘Reduce procedural hardship and improve transparency’
ECI has been asked to publish gender-disaggregated data on additions, deletions, pending adjudications, reasons for deletion, notices, hearings, appeals and restorations, and to independently monitor the process through spot checks and sample surveys.
VII. ‘Create a real remedy for wrongful exclusion’
The group is critical of the current requirement that excluded persons file Form 6 to seek re-inclusion and has called it an inefficacious remedy that effectively forces a settled voter to falsely declare themselves a first-time voter or a person who has shifted residence without even guaranteeing reinstatement.
It has asked for a window of at least one year for re-admission “so that no voter is left behind or out of either the SIR Roll or the electoral process as there are no guarantees that they will be included as part of the updated SIR list which will likely to be the Reference List for future ECI voter list cleaning exercise and therefore they face the risk of undergoing the torturous process of proving “citizenship all over again.””
There has also been a call to withdraw the “unconstitutional architecture of Tribunals” to adjudicate voter eligibility.
VIII. ‘Build in independent social audits’
The group wants concurrent, community-based social audits, including women from marginalised communities, to adjudicate residency and voter status in doubtful cases. It has also called for retrospective social audits of the 13 states/UTs already covered in Phases 1 and 2.
IX. ‘Formally decouple SIR exclusion from citizenship status’
Finally, hinting at the Supreme Court judgment that has confined ECI’s jurisdiction strictly to voter-list revision, the group has asked ECI to issue a clear public statement in text and video that exclusion from the updated SIR does not amount to a denial of citizenship.
The appeal carries fifty signatories drawn from across the country, spanning feminist and queer-trans rights activists, lawyers, academics, journalists and researchers, and has expressed hopes that ECI, “as a constitutional authority,” will take serious note of all the concerns and suggestions.
Phase 3 of the SIR is already underway in Karnataka, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi. The outcome of the earlier phases of SIR has already created panic among minority and vulnerable communities. For instance, in Pune, reports have emerged of fear among Muslim communities, with a BLO saying he received around 40 to 50 calls, 90 per cent of which were from Muslim families. Similarly, in Bengaluru, persons of LGBTQ+ community have raised fears.