Supreme Court Issues Notice To Centre & ECI On Plea Challenging SIR In Maharashtra

A bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana issued notices to the Centre, Election Commission of India and others on a plea filed by Arun Anandagiri, a chartered accountant and journalist by profession.

Senior Advocate Arvind Datar, appearing for the petitioner, submitted that voters temporarily relocated during redevelopment in Mumbai and Pune have been deleted as “person not found”.

He said around 20 million out of the 97.9 million total voters in Maharashtra have been deleted from the draft rolls and another 12.2 million electors have been struck off under “logical discrepancies”.

The petition stated that till the issue is adjudicated by the Apex Court, the revision exercise in the state should be kept in abeyance and no voter whose name appeared in the pre-SIR list should be excluded or deleted.

The Apex Court has posted the matter for hearing on November 5.

The draft electoral rolls released after the SIR conducted across Maharashtra have seen 20.68 million electors, or 21.14 per cent, dropped from the voters’ list across the state.

The office of the state chief electoral officer had said that across Maharashtra, of the 97,854,049 registered voters, as many as 20,688,487 electors, or 21.14 per cent, have been excluded from the draft electoral rolls as they could not be traced at their given addresses during the SIR exercise.