NEW DELHI: Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday excoriated the Centre and the Election Commission’s Special Intension Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls by highlighting an article on his X handle, written by founding DG and mission director of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) R.S. Sharma, and calling it a “powerful and courageous” critique of the ongoing exercise.
“This is a powerful and courageous article by a very distinguished former civil servant with a background in science and technology. The Election Commission has unleashed chaos and absolute mayhem that is sparing nobody,” Ramesh wrote on X (formerly Twitter) while sharing Sharma’s article, headlined ‘State refuses to recognise its own people: This is nihilism, no way to govern.’
In the article, Sharma argues that the SIR places an unreasonable burden on ordinary citizens to repeatedly prove their identity in a country where, before the mid-2000s, most Indians were born at home, where institutional deliveries were under 39 per cent.
“The Registration of Births and Deaths Act has required, since 1969, that every birth be registered within 21 days; running that system was the state’s job, and for decades it did not. Among children under five, only 41 per cent of births were registered as recently as 2005-06, and before the mid-2000s, most Indians were born at home; institutional deliveries were under 39 per cent nationally. The reassuring figure that 98 per cent of births are now registered describes today’s newborns; it says nothing about the adults already on the rolls,” his article mentioned.
If the strictest view is right, that only a birth certificate issued at the time of birth
is genuine proof of date of birth, then perhaps one voter in eight holds one; “some 85 crore do not,” he wrote, adding, “A test that the overwhelming majority of citizens cannot pass is not a test of eligibility. It is a machine for exclusion.”
The former bureaucrat further contended that India had spent decades building digital public infrastructure only for officials to return to door-to-door verification and paper documentation.
Backed by his experience at UIDAI, Sharma said that during Aadhaar’s early years, most people did not know their birth dates or years.
“I can speak about this from experience,” he wrote. “We recorded it as verified where a document existed, and as declared or approximate where none did.” Many villagers, he noted, identified their age by recalling major events such as droughts rather than a specific date, which is why January 1 became the default birth date for many Aadhaar holders when only the birth year was known.
“To demand a precise, documented date of birth from such people is not rigour; it is exclusion,” Sharma argued.
The Congress’s latest criticism comes after the EC declared that not only existing voters covered under the revision but also new applicants seeking inclusion in the electoral rolls must furnish their parents’ SIR details while filing Form 6 (for new voters).
UN criticises SIR
In a recent letter to the government, UN Special Rapporteurs have raised concerns over the SIR, alleging that the process lacks transparency.
According to the report written on May 1, 2026, it gave a 60-day timeline to the Indian government to respond to the concerns regarding “The large-scale removal of millions of names from electoral rolls through an SIR process led by the ECI, particularly affecting members of minority groups.”
Agencies