TODAY, I HOLD TWO EPIC NUMBERS after Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’) exercise. A friend is registered in both Delhi and Patna. Another acquaintance found his entire family’s names missing. These are not isolated mishaps. Multiply them by millions and the scale of the problem becomes clearer.
This is not a column about whether elections are “rigged” or whether the Election Commission acts under political pressure. That debate has its own space. My concern as a student of public policy is more fundamental: our electoral database is broken. It is not merely a technical glitch. It is a governance failure. And unless addressed, it risks hollowing out the credibility of the world’s largest democracy.
In her book Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (2015), anthropologist Nayanika Mathur uses the phrase “paper tiger” to capture a very Indian paradox. The state looks fearsome and efficient on paper, with laws, schemes and official circulars that roar with authority. But when these promises meet everyday practice, the system often falters. Files get stuck, capacity is weak, and the outcomes rarely match the proclamations. Mathur shows how this gap between the image of the state and its everyday functioning is not accidental but deeply baked into how governance works in India.
Our electoral system reflects this same problem. On paper, India has one of the most detailed and ambitious election management frameworks in the world, with rules, revisions, and claims of near-universal coverage. Yet in practice, the foundations are shaky. Even if we assume there is no deliberate manipulation, the machinery itself struggles to deliver accuracy. Bihar’s recent Special Intensive Revision exercise exposed the scale of the problem: 7 lakh voters were registered in two places, 26 lakh had shifted, 18 lakh were deceased and over 11,000 were missing. The total number of voters in the state shrank by 65.6 lakh from 7.9 crore to 7.24 crore. It is this disjuncture—between the roaring claims of order and the everyday reality of error—that makes our electoral rolls a textbook example of Mathur’s “paper tiger.”
