SIR 2.0 | House-to-house enumeration in 12 states, Union territories to begin from November 4

SIR in these states and Union territories with 51 crore voters will conclude on February 7, 2026, with the publication of the final electoral roll.

New Delhi: The house-to-house enumeration of the second phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls will start on Tuesday, amid West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee leading a protest against the voters' list clean up exercise and Tamil Nadu's decision to challenge it in the court.

The 12 states and union territories where the second round of SIR will be conducted are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

The SIR in these states and union territories, which has around 51 crore voters, will conclude on February 7 next year with the publication of the final electoral roll. The EC had conducted the first phase of SIR in Bihar between June and September this year where the final list had around 7.42 crore voters, down from 7.89 crore as on June 24.

While Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala and West Bengal will go to polls in April-May next year, the EC has not included Assam, which is also election-bound as citizenship provisions for Assam are different.

Trinamool Congress has already upped the ante over SIR with Mamata all set to join a protest in Bengal on Tuesday against SIR. A multi-party meeting called in Chennai by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin had decided to challenge the SIR in the Supreme Court.

This round of SIR is the ninth such exercise since independence, with the last one conducted in 2002-04.

The house-to-house enumeration, which starts on Tuesday, will continue till December 4 and the EC will release the draft electoral rolls on December 9. People can file claims and objections on the draft roll till January 8 next year.

In a change from Bihar exercise, no document is needed to be filed while returning the enumeration form. Those whose name appear in the 2002-04 voters' list in these states need not provide any document. Those voters who are not in this list also need not provide any documents if the names of their parents or close relatives are in the 2002-04 list.

Only those who cannot link their name with a name in the past list need to provide documents. For this, notices will be issued to such voters between December 9 and January 31 next year.

According to the EC, almost 90% of the voters need not provide any documents as they would be in the 2002-04 list or they could be linked to a voter in the past list.