New Delhi: A nationwide Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, similar on the lines of what was carried out in Bihar, is likely to take place before West Bengal goes to the elections next year.
Informed sources told The Sunday Guardian that with the Bihar assembly elections expected to conclude by November 2025 and West Bengal scheduled for May 2026, the nationwide SIR of electoral rolls is likely to take place between December 2025 and April 2026.
Keeping these timelines in mind, officials say there is a clear four-to-five-month window between the end of the Bihar polls and the start of the West Bengal election cycle, during which this period can be used to conduct the nationwide SIR.
To be sure, the Election Commission has not issued any official communication so far about this proposed nationwide exercise. The timeline is considered feasible if one looks at past election schedules that were held amidst the Covid pandemic. In Bihar in 2020, the Chief Election Commissioner, Sunil Arora announced the assembly poll schedule on 25 September, with voting held in three phases between 28 October and 7 November for 243 constituencies. In West Bengal in 2021, the schedule was announced on 26 February, polling was held in eight phases from 27 March to 29 April, and votes were counted on 2 May.
With the “Pitra Paksh” period—considered inauspicious in Hinduism—being between 7 and 21 September, the announcement of the Bihar election schedule is expected only after this period ends. In 2020, when “Pitra Paksh” ran from 1 to 17 September, the Bihar polls were similarly announced once the fortnight had concluded.
If the December-April 2025-26 plan goes ahead, it will mark the largest single electoral roll clean-up exercise ever attempted in India.
The Election Commission has already tested its capacity through the Bihar SIR exercise, which was completed in just under two months. Each Booth Level Officer (BLO) covered around 250 households or roughly 1,000 voters. The consensus within the Commission is that the existing systems and procedures in place are enough to conduct a nationwide SIR.
The challenges that surfaced in Bihar have already been identified, and it is expected that these will be factored in to ensure a smoother process at the national level. For the nationwide rollout, the gaps exposed in Bihar will be addressed: training modules will be refined for BLOs in high-migration urban constituencies, while hybrid offline-to-online data entry tools will be strengthened for rural blocks where connectivity remains an issue.
Significantly, because Bihar’s revision has already been conducted, the nationwide SIR will not be required in that state, which is among India’s most densely populated. This reduces the overall scope of the exercise and allows the Commission to focus resources on other states.
One of the unexpected gains from the attack that the ECI and the entire SIR process came from the Opposition for doing the exercise in Bihar, is that now the number of voters approaching the ECI to update their details in the roll and EPIC has increased significantly, which will further reduce the burden on the ECI while conducting the nationwide exercise as newer updated voter details will need not be focused on.
The sequencing of Bihar and West Bengal elections, together with the Commission’s experience in handling large-scale revisions, provides the framework for what will be the largest electoral roll exercise in the world’s largest democracy.
The aim is to complete it between December and April so that updated rolls are ready not only for the 2026 West Bengal elections but also well ahead of the next general election cycle.
The objective of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is to ensure that every eligible citizen’s name is included in the electoral roll, while ineligible entries are removed, and the entire process of additions and deletions is made fully transparent.
The need for such an exercise arises from multiple factors: rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, the continuous flow of young citizens becoming eligible to vote, non-reporting of deaths, and the presence of foreign illegal immigrants in the rolls.
