Bihar Voter Revision Worries Migrant Workers in Telangana

 Hyderabad: As the Election Commission of India (ECI) conducts the controversial special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar ahead of the Assembly elections, the pressure to meet the July 25 deadline has left many workers, families and students who are outside the state, unsettled.

The SIR requires all voters enrolled after 2003 to re-submit proof of citizenship. This is being done through a household enumeration process involving door-to-door visits by booth-level officers across Bihar. Those who fail to fill the form by July 25 risk being left out of the draft rolls.

“I’m on duty right now. No one I know is going back home yet, but if this is really happening, if names will be cut or there will be questions about citizenship then we may have to go,” said Raju, a migrant worker at a factory in Hyderabad. “It’s a basic right, but we can't leave our jobs for too long either.”

Some of the list of accepted documents are difficult to produce for many families, especially in rural areas, where formal paperwork is either incomplete or never created in the first place.

Suresh Paswan, a daily-wage labourer from Darbhanga, working in Miyapur. asked, “My voter ID is from Bihar. I voted in the election. But now they want more documents. I can't leave work or buy a ticket to go back. Does that mean I stop being a voter?”

The Bihar Association in Hyderabad has received queries from workers in the city.

Vinod Kumar Gupta, who serves as the treasurer, said the association was trying to help but could not meet the scale of requests unless the government steps in. “Not everyone can make that journey home. It takes 30 to 50 hours one way. If the Bihar government provides free travel, maybe 80 per cent will go. People want to vote. They see this election as important,” he said.

To accommodate increased demand from Bihari migrants, special trains have been announced from Telangana. These include services from Charlapalli and Hyderabad to Raxaul, Patna, Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga. Some are running until the end of July and early August, including Train No 07255 from Charlapalli to Patna on Wednesdays, until July 30, and Train No 07256 on Fridays, until August 1.

Sanjeev Kumar of the Human Rights Forum called it a distortion of the idea of voting itself. “If someone is Bihari by birth, how can their right to vote depend on their physical location? Even NRIs who live abroad for years still vote when they visit. Some of them even have citizenship there. But this is disenfranchising just the poor.”

The revision has drawn comparisons with the NRC process in Assam and the idea of a paper-based citizenship test. Critics say the default assumption now seems to be that voters are outsiders unless proven otherwise. There is also concern that local officials, tasked with verifying documents, have been given wide discretion without clear safeguards.

The final draft rolls will be published on August 1. The matter is being heard in the Supreme Court, where multiple petitions have been filed. The next hearing is on July 10.