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The Supreme Court on Wednesday, May 27, upheld that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has the power to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. A division bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi pronounced the judgement following petitions that had challenged the ECI notification to conduct SIR in June 2025 ahead of the Bihar Assembly polls held last year.
"When the statute itself authorises a special revision at any time, for reasons to be recorded and in such manner as the Election Commission may deem fit, the impugned exercise cannot be invalidated merely because it does not conform in every respect to the ordinary modalities contemplated for routine revision,” Chief Justice Surya Kant observed.
The key question in contention before the court was whether the procedure adopted by the EC in conducting the SIR is contrary to or in violation of the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
“In our considered opinion, the impugned SIR does not supplant the Representation of the People Act and the Rules. Rather, it breathes life into the constitutional mandate under Article 324 (establishes the Election Commission of India (ECI) as an independent constitutional body) within the precise statutory contours provided by Section 21(3). Therefore, it cannot be said that the Commission has acted in excess of its statutory powers."
Section 21(3) of the Representation of People’s Act grants the Election Commission of India (ECI) the statutory authority to direct a special revision of electoral rolls for any constituency or part of a constituency, at any time, for reasons to be recorded in writing.
On the contention that ECI cannot determine citizenship of a person, the Court held that the poll body can examine citizenship but it should be limited to the inclusion or exclusion of a person from the electoral rolls.
"Upon detailed consideration, we have come to the conclusion that, in view of the statutory requirement under Section 16 of the Representation of the People Act, the Commission, in the course of preparing or revising electoral rolls, is undoubtedly empowered to examine questions bearing upon citizenship. However, such an inquiry can only be undertaken from the limited standpoint of determining inclusion or exclusion from the electoral rolls and must be carried out with due regard to the presumption operating in favour of an elector whose name already exists on the rolls. It is within this confined statutory setting that the Commission assesses the material before it for the purpose of arriving at a determination confined to electoral purposes," the judgment said.
The Court observed that the object sought to be achieved by the SIR bore a direct nexus with the constitutional goal of ensuring free and fair elections. It noted that elections did not rest merely on the mechanics of polling but depended also on the ‘integrity, accuracy, and credibility of the electoral rolls, which formed the foundation of the democratic process.’
It further observed that the “reasons recorded by the Election Commission, including the passage of more than four decades since the last intensive revision, large-scale additions and deletions over the years, and rapid urbanisation and migration leading to the possibility of duplication and inaccuracies in the electoral rolls, were clearly aimed at preserving that foundational integrity.”
A series of petitions had challenged the ECI's requirement that voters whose names were absent from the 2002 electoral rolls — or the 2003 rolls in certain states — must establish ancestral linkage to a person whose name appeared in those electoral rolls.