LINK: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/sir-and-the-annihilation-of-rights/article70380737.ece
Why in the News?
- The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, currently being undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI) across 12 States and Union Territories, covering nearly 51 crore voters, has recently come under scrutiny.
- An eerily similar structural codification of exclusions is observed in this democratic process and the technocratic adventures implemented in welfare schemes, particularly MGNREGA, prompting concerns over the annihilation of rights.
Background of Electoral Enrollment and Citizenship
Historically, the principle of voter enrollment has been premised on presumed citizenship and constitutional morality.
- Legal Basis: Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, states that any person “ordinarily resident in a constituency” can be enrolled in the electoral rolls.
- Expansive Interpretation: In 1999, the Gauhati High Court provided an expansive interpretation of “ordinarily a resident” as being a “habitual resident of that place” who has the “intention to dwell permanently.”
- Premise of Inclusion: Exercising constitutional morality, the ECI and the judiciary operated on the premise of presumed citizenship, where any resident adult was by default considered a valid voter.
Structural Inversion under Special Intensive Revision (SIR)
The ongoing SIR marks a U-turn from this default conceptualisation of citizenship, introducing procedural mandates that invert the state-citizen relationship.
- Inversion of Responsibility: Every elector, irrespective of having voted in earlier elections, is now mandated to match their names and documents with the electoral rolls of 2002-2005.
- Risk of Disenfranchisement: This act, which shifts the onus of compliance from the state to the people, risks disenfranchising many, with women, migrants, and the homeless being likely to be most hit.
- Procedural Difficulty: The 2002-2005 rolls are not machine readable, meaning even a minor mismatch between present details and earlier records can result in notices and potential deletion.
Technocratic Playbook: A Formula for Exclusion
The architecture of SIR strongly resembles the technocratic playbook employed by the Union government in welfare delivery, which has consistently resulted in large-scale exclusions.
Core Elements of the Exclusionary Formula
- Responsibility of inclusion is shifted from the state to the people.
- Strict targets are set for officials with haphazard protocols for implementation.
- Officials are disciplined to achieve 100% coverage in a short time.
- Ultimatum is given to people to comply or risk having their rights stripped away.
- Efficiency gains are subsequently shown, based on de-duplication by deleting people.
MGNREGA: A Case Study in Digital Exclusion
The implementation of the Aadhaar-based payment system (ABPS) in MGNREGA serves as the primary parallel to the SIR process.
- Mandatory ABPS: In 2022, the Union government mandated ABPS, requiring workers to link their MGNREGA job cards with their Aadhaar, making the right to work conditional on this digital linkage.
- Procedural Flaws: Procedures on dealing with mismatches across workers’ two documents were unclear, leading to officials transferring the responsibility of fixing errors to the workers.
- Hastened Deletions: To hastily achieve 100% Aadhaar linking targets, officials resorted to deleting workers from the database.
- Research based on a random sample of 2.98 lakh worker deletions between 2022 and 2024 revealed that an estimated two-thirds of all those deleted were removed on grounds of being “unwilling to work,” a clear legal violation of the Act.
- National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) App: The introduction of this app in 2021 for digital attendance recording denied attendance to many workers and was flagged by the Ministry of Rural Development itself for being “misused or manipulated.”
- Administrative Route to Closure: The pressure of stringent targets and timelines led frontline officials, unable to address migration-related absences or documentation glitches, to use nearly 27 lakh deletions in just one month as an administrative route to close pending records.
Compromise on Constitutional Morality
What is fundamentally similar in the technocratic approaches to MGNREGA and SIR is the structural codification of exclusions, which compromises the constitutional ethos.
- Pressure on Officials: Even well-meaning officials are pressured to focus on dashboards and targets, leading to severe mental stress, with some reportedly taking their own lives.
- Exclusions as Progress: Field officials are judged on completion rates, making exclusions a quick way to show progress (e.g., de-duplication).
- Delayed Action: The harmful consequences often become a fait accompli; for instance, a standard operating procedure on worker deletions was issued by the Union government more than a year after the rights of millions were deleted.
- Inaccessible Grievance Channels: Grievance channels are rendered inaccessible for vulnerable groups due to the requirement for procedural agency that is rarely available.
- Ambedkar’s Stress on Fraternity: Dr. B.R. Ambedkar stressed the need for constitutional morality, implying that institutions must embody fraternity, where inclusion must be the norm and exclusion the exception.
- The ECI, by inverting the citizen-state relationship and imposing onerous documentation on people, is compromising on this constitutional morality.
Way Forward
- Social audits must be implemented as participatory verification mechanism so that community-led review replaces rigid historical-document matching and so that disenfranchisement risks are reduced through local knowledge and corrective action.
- Machine-readability and digitisation of historical records must be ensured with concurrent provision for local-level correction so that minor mismatches do not translate into notices and deletions, and so that reliance on archaic non-machine-readable rolls is removed.
- Grievance mechanisms must be decentralised and simplified and outreach must be conducted for vulnerable groups so that remedial action can be taken without excessive procedural agency being demanded from disenfranchised persons.
- Performance targets and dashboard metrics must be recalibrated to prioritise inclusion outcomes rather than completion percentages so that perverse incentives for exclusions are neutralised and administrative focus is shifted toward rights-protective implementation.
- Institutional checks informed by constitutional morality must be strengthened so that electoral administration is guided by principle of fraternity and inclusion rather than by mechanistic compliance with rigid timelines and numerical targets.
Conclusion
- The convergence of administrative strategies in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and welfare schemes like MGNREGA highlights a systemic issue where technocratic mandates and rigid targets are leveraged to bypass the fundamental principles of inclusion and constitutional morality.
- This shift, placing the burden of proof and compliance disproportionately on the poor and marginalised, requires immediate course correction to prevent the structural disenfranchisement of millions of citizens and to re-establish the citizen-state relationship based on fraternity and justice.
UPSC MAINS PYQs
- Discuss the procedures to decide the disputes arising out of the election of a Member of the Parliament or State Legislature under the Representation of the People Act, 1951. What are the grounds on which the election of any returned candidate may be declared void? What remedy is available to the aggrieved party against the decision? Refer to the case laws. (2022)
- Discuss the role of the Election Commission of India in the light of the evolution of the Model Code of Conduct. (2022)
- “There is a need for simplification of procedure for disqualification of persons found guilty of corrupt practices under the Representation of Peoples Act.” Comment. (2020)
- On what grounds a people’s representative can be disqualified under the Representation of People Act, 1951? Also, mention the remedies available to such a person against his disqualification. (2019)
