Missing the SIR Memo

The election commission has issued front-page ads in newspapers and also put out social media posts on the ongoing SIR, but many workers in the national capital are unaware of the revisions owing to poor literacy and poor access to digital platforms

Anuja

A Bihari migrant reads a news report on the ongoing SIR drive. Anuja/The Migration Story

NEW DELHI: It’s a regular busy morning at the labour chowk in East Delhi’s Gharoli area. Daily wage workers congregate here every day, like they do in similar nakas across the national capital, in the hope of being spotted by a contractor or a recruiter who would offer them a day’s job. Many of the workers here are migrants from Bihar, worried about the work and income this day would fetch them, unaware of a raging debate around Bihar’s ongoing electoral roll revision that risks leaving out workers like them.

Sachin Kumar, 34, a migrant from Madhepura in Bihar said he was clueless about a front-page news report in a Hindi newspaper next to him on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive of electoral rolls that is currently being run in his home state. 

“I have no idea what this is. I am hearing about this for the first time,” Kumar told The Migration Story.

The Election Commission (EC) last month announced the SIR drive in Bihar to ‘ensure’ that no eligible citizen is left out while no ineligible person is included in the electoral roll. The drive, first of a kind in the country that requires one of 11 documents to verify voters registered after 2003, began on July 1. The draft electoral roll will be published on August 1 and the final roll after disposal of claims and objections on 30 August.

There are concerns among labour migration experts and opposition parties that this exercise could leave out many low-income migrants, particularly inter-state migrants, from Bihar. Many have also questioned the timing of the exercise – just four months before state elections – and its tightly executed timeline. Even though the registration deadline ends on Friday, July 25, the move already faces a legal challenge in the apex court.

The Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), a nonprofit,  filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court earlier this month stating that due to ‘high poverty and migration rates’ in the state, many citizens of Bihar lack access to documents like birth certificates or parental records. The petition said that if the SIR order is not set aside, it can ‘arbitrarily and without due process disenfranchise lakhs of voters’ and disrupt free and fair elections.

The petition noted that many voters (to the tune of three crores or more) from marginalised communities like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and migrant workers ‘could be excluded from voting’ due to stringent requirements under the SIR. 

The final decision of the Supreme Court is pending.

Sachin Kumar, a Bihari migrant worker, at a labour chowk in East Delhi's Gharoli area. Anuja/The Migration Story

For migrant workers like Kumar, learning about this development back home is worrisome. “You tell us, how can this be done at one month’s notice? I do not have any of these documents, I do not have money to go back and I do not even have a smartphone to try and do this online,” he said.

Kumar first migrated out of Madhepura in 2008 to work at a factory in Gurgaon. Since then, he migrates for large parts of the year in search of steady employment and better wages. 

At the labour chowk, most of his other friends from Bihar – including Pintu Kumar Pal from Buxar and Anjeet Kumar from Bhagalpur – have either not heard about the drive or do not know what to do about it. Anjeet has ‘seen a couple of YouTube videos’ but had no clue how this move would affect him. 

Labour rights experts said that there was a lack of awareness among migrant workers living outside Bihar about the ongoing SIR drive. Their poor digital literacy would likely disenfranchise many of them, experts feared. They added that the SIR process is only reflective of larger issues with policy framing that remains blind sighted to India’s mobile informal workforce, that too from a state which has the second highest out-migration numbers in the country. 

POOR AWARENESS

The last SIR drive in Bihar took place in 2003. The EC in its order on the drive dated June 24, 2025, spoke about how in the last 20 years significant changes have taken place in the electoral rolls due to large scale additions and deletions. (Read more about the SIR drive in the first part of our series on the impact of electoral roll revision on Bihar’s migrants here).

“Rapid urbanization and frequent migration of population from one place to another on account of education, livelihood and other reasons, have become a regular trend,” the order noted.   

While the EC’s order acknowledges ‘frequent migration’ as being a key demographic factor in the state, workers like Pal at the Gharoli labour chowk said that the ‘system’ does not recognise how frequently workers like him migrate and has not done enough to make them aware about the SIR drive.

“I had a voter identity card but it got stolen during one of my journeys. Until now, I was only worried about getting a new card. No one told me about this drive, not even my family members back home. Now you tell me, what is my recourse?” said an exasperated Pal. He added that his parents were not educated and he was worried that the required documents were not easy to locate.

Similarly, mother-son pair Mantoosa Khatoon and Mohammed Najre Alam, who live at a homeless shelter in South Delhi said they do not know about any such voter verification drive. They hail from Sitamarhi district in Bihar and came to the national capital last year in search of work. “I am just praying that our names do not get cut from the electoral list,” Khatoon said. 

In order to address the gaps of enumerating migrants in the exercise, the Bihar Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), in mid-July launched a two-step online form and publicized it in front page advertisements in newspapers. Both the EC and Bihar CEO are running a social media campaign (like this and this) to create awareness about the ongoing drive.

But labour experts said this may not be enough.

Dharmendra Kumar, secretary of Jan Pahal, a nonprofit which focuses on poor and low-income migrant families, said that based on his interaction with Bihari workers over the past few weeks, he feels there is a ‘panic situation’ on the ground. 

“The major challenge is that they are not digitally literate and you require some kind of digital literacy to go through this process of verification. Even if you decide to get it done offline, you need to get a print out, send it to your family members back home,” said Kumar.

Several workers do not have smart phones, and if they do then their voter ids may not be linked to their current phone numbers, he explained. 

“There is a huge disconnect of policy with the ground reality. The timing of this exercise, in the middle of paddy cultivation when lakhs of Bihari workers go to states like Punjab and Kerala – how can we expect them to come back home? Our policy makers do not have the basic idea of how millions of migrant workers function,” Kumar added.

An email sent to the EC with queries did not get any response. This news report will be updated if they do. 

MIGRANT REALITIES

At another labour chowk in East Delhi, Mohammed Junaid, a migrant from Sheikhpura in Bihar, said he has been coming to the national capital for work the past three years. Before that he was working in Mumbai for six years and a couple of years each in Kolkata and Goa.

“My only constant is Bihar. I do not have any address proof to make government ids from the cities I work in. And, now we are told we must verify a widely accepted identity card like the voter id,” he said. “I don’t have enough money to pay for even a one-way train fare, this is unfair to workers like us at so many levels,” he added.

Mohammed Junaid (left), who has travelled far and wide to work, at a labour chowk in East Delhi.

Anuja/The Migration Story

An analysis of the 2011 Census, published in 2019, showed 24% men in India migrated for work/employment related reasons but this number was double for Bihar at around 55%.

In line with Junaid’s migration history, a 2016 paper by International Growth Centre (IGC) argued that typically in any given year, labour migrants from Bihar work in at least three different locations in the country and it is ‘not uncommon for them to traverse 4,000 km each year’. 

More than 90% migrant workers from rural Bihar travel long distances to other states for work, while only 5.8% migrate within Bihar, according to a paper published in 2020. 

Pushpendra (he uses one name), former professor and chairperson at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Patna centre said that the exercise will inevitably also raise the larger issue of domicile – who votes from where and who has the power to decide upon this. 

“If I am a domestic migrant, should I be allowed to decide where I should vote from or not? This is an important question. The EC through this exercise has simply said, please fix your domicile issue by providing us the relevant document,” Pushpendra said. 

He added that ‘clearly the most affected group’ would be migrant workers who would find it difficult to access documents at a short notice. Pushpendra explained that in case of someone being a short-term migrant or women who migrate after marriage – they do not belong to any one place.

“These questions have not been discussed, nor is there any firm policy on it. There needs to be more debate and consultation on this. Issues like short term mobility, student mobility, marriage migration or migration for work – these complexities need to be addressed through consultations,” he added. 

‘I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO FILL THE FORM ONLINE'

A.K., 36-year-old Bihari migrant worker at a textile factory in Surat (who did not wish to be identified), said his elder brother in home town Jamui told him about the drive and asked him to send his documents through WhatsApp. He provided an aawasiya patra (domicile certificate) which he had made last year when he unsuccessfully applied for a volunteer force which works as an auxiliary to the police. 

“I did not try to fill the form online; I do not know how to do it. A lot of workers here who do not have a literate family member back home have not been able to apply for verification,” he said. 

A busy morning at a labour chowk in East Delhi. Anuja/The Migration Story

The lack of awareness and poor digital literacy among many citizens of Bihar has Jagdeep Chhokar, founder member of ADR, term the SIR ‘alarming’. He said that many migrant workers from Bihar do not know that such a verification drive is going on. He added that despite a draft roll going to be published soon and the final roll coming out after a month, migrant workers who return home to vote will find out about their exclusion only on the day of polling when they reach their respective booths. 

“This migrant issue has the potential to create a very difficult situation in Bihar on the day of polling. This foresight, I do not think the EC has displayed because they seem to think that by putting such ads saying migrants can verify online, it will be done,” Chhokar told The Migration Story. 

“You expect a migrant construction worker from Bihar who will see the print advertisements, in say Goa, to go to a cybercafé or a facilitation centre and get this done? They will neither have the money nor the documents on them to get this done,” Chhokar, who is also a trustee at migrant rights nonprofit Aajeevika Bureau, added.

A press release shared by the EC dated July 21, 2025, stated that poll officials in Bihar met with representatives of all political parties and “shared detailed lists of the 29.62 lakh electors whose forms have not been received so far and also of the nearly 43.93 lakh electors who were not found at their addresses.” 

It added that 12 major political parties from Bihar have been requested to connect with these remaining electors, through their district presidents and nearly 1.5 lakh booth level agents (or BLAs who engage with poll machinery) to ensure that no eligible elector is left out. As on 24 June, Bihar’s total electorate is nearly 7.9 crores.

POLITICAL CONNECT

The SIR drive in Bihar has been announced just months ahead of the crucial assembly elections in the state. The upcoming elections in Bihar – a politically crucial North Indian state – is likely to be a tough fight between the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Janata Dal United combine and the main opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress alliance. 

Parties on both sides of the aisle have meticulously included migrants and migration issues in their outreach campaigns. For instance, while the BJP has plans to fan out its leaders to 150 districts across the country to engage with Bihari migrants while earlier this year Congress’ young face from Bihar, Kanhaiya Kumar, led the ‘palayan roko, naukri do’ (stop migration, give jobs) yatra.  

Now the SIR drive has swung the ground cadres of political parties into action. Soon after its announcement, political parties in the state started appointing more BLAs, who coordinate with the poll machinery during preparation and revision of the voters' list, according to a news report by the Press Trust of India.

After the reverse migration crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic five years ago, most political parties reach out to migrant workers in the run up to the elections. Since many of them do not return to their home states to vote, the political spotlight on them has also faded.

The EC, while issuing a note on 29 December 2022 on remoting voting among domestic migrants, highlighted that inability to vote due to internal migration was one of the ‘prominent reasons’ that needed to be addressed in order to improve voter turnout.

Enduring economic and social ties to their origin regions is a key factor for migrants being underrepresented in destination area politics, according to a study published in 2021.

All the Bihari migrant workers who The Migration Story reached out for this piece said they had never considered shifting their voter ids to the destination cities where they work. They also questioned why their votes were valid in the Lok Sabha elections last summer and now there is a question mark on its validity.

“How is it that the burden of onus to verify an existing voter id is on the voter himself? It should be the job of the authorities. Imagine, we voted for an X party and they came to power. Now we are being told that our vote only may not be valid anymore?” questioned Kanhaiya Saini, a 40-year-old migrant worker from Munger in Bihar, who is currently a daily wage worker in Delhi.

Anuja is an independent journalist based in Delhi and writes on the intersection of policy and politics.