Government Trusts Aadhaar on Welfare; It Should Rely on It for Voter Lists

Gist The Election Commission is conducting a nationwide Special Intensive Revision SIR to clean electoral rolls, resulting in the deletion of over 13 crore names. However, this manual, document-intensive exercise is highly expensive, disproportionately burdens marginalized communities, and infringes on the Home Ministry's mandate to determine citizenship. Transitioning to a voluntary Aadhaar-EPIC linkage using face authentication would eliminate duplicates, verify age, and drastically reduce administrative costs without disenfranchising genuine voters. Background The Election Commission EC is mandated to maintain accurate electoral rolls, removing dead or duplicate voters. To achieve this, the EC revived the Special Intensive Revision SIR , a door-to-door, paper-based verification method that had been mothballed for two decades. During this process, electoral officers often demanded documents to verify citizenship at the doorstep. On May 27 , the Supreme Court ruled that under the Citizenship Act , the final determination of citizenship belongs exclusively to the Ministry of Home Affairs MHA , not the EC. The transition to digital public infrastructure offers an alternative: using existing biometric databases to verify identity and liveness, leaving citizenship determination to the…