SC directs ECI to publish names, reasons for excluding 65 lakh electors from Bihar draft roll

New Delhi (Team Newsbuddy) : The Supreme Court, in an interim order on Thursday (August 14, 2025), directed the Election Commission of India to publish an enumerated, booth wise list of approximately 65 lakh electors not included in the draft electoral roll published on August 1 during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in poll-bound Bihar.
A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi instructed the list should be complete with the individual reasons – death, migration, untraceability, duplicate registrations – for each exclusion on the draft roll.

“If, according to you, 22 lakh of the 65 lakh non-included voters are dead, why are their names not being disclosed? There is a narrative doing the rounds that family members do not know their kin have been left out as dead in the draft roll. If you put out the names in the public domain for all to see, that narrative disappears… In short, we want a ‘Poonam Devi’s’ family in Bihar to know that her name has been deleted because she is dead,” Justice Kant addressed the Election Commission of India (ECI), represented by senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi.