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At issue is the Special Intensive Revision, the ECI's recheck of the names on India's electoral rolls. It has left about one in seven names off draft rolls since 2025. In Delhi, the share is nearly a third, the highest of any large state or Union Territory: more than 47.5 lakh electors did not carry onto the draft roll published on August 31, according to the Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi.

The day before the march, the Supreme Court asked Kumar, the ECI, and the Union government to answer petitions challenging decisions taken in the revision. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said the court had not approved any change to Form 6.

Form 6 is how a voter in Delhi whose name is missing from the draft roll asks to be added, much as a first-time voter would. That window now runs to October 30, and the final roll is due on December 4. A voter whose name survived, but could not be linked to an older roll, waits for a notice, then a hearing before an election officer, with documents that prove who they are and, for some, who their parents were.

The petitions say the two other Election Commissioners objected in writing to about 14 SIR decisions; the ECI has said their letters concerned an officer on deputation, not policy. Opposition leaders say many of those struck off are minority voters. The ECI rejects allegations of wrongdoing and says the revision removes dead, shifted and duplicate electors. Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Sambit Patra accused the Opposition of trying to create "an atmosphere of anarchy".WHY IT MATTERS

Among the states and Union Territories with at least one crore electors before the revision, six in Phase 3 left out more than 15 per cent of names: Delhi, Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jharkhand, and Haryana. In Phases 1 and 2, two did: Uttar Pradesh, at 18.7 per cent, and Tamil Nadu.

Inside Delhi, the share ranged from 16.5 per cent in Rohini to 47.8 per cent in Tughlakabad. Six of the 10 constituencies with the highest shares are in the South East district: Tughlakabad, Okhla, Kasturba Nagar, Kalkaji, Badarpur, and Jangpura. By number, Burari had the most names left off, nearly 1.7 lakh (39.2 per cent), followed by Okhla, with more than 1.6 lakh (45.2 per cent).

CEO Delhi's report counts nearly 13.8 lakh electors "with No Mapping" and more than 19.3 lakh "having Logical Discrepancies". The report does not say whether the two counts overlap, so they cannot be added.BIG PICTURE

Nagaland published its draft roll on September 20, Tripura's is due on December 12, three more have not been announced, and the ECI ordered a Special Revision, not the SIR, for Assam on November 17, 2025.

The figures count names left off and leave out new voters added since; they cannot show who was left off. The ECI stopped publishing the gender of flagged voters in the Phase 3 lists of at least six states.WHAT THEY SAID

On October 5, the ECI called Rahul Gandhi's post on Form 6 misleading. It said its June 24, 2025 order for the SIR in Bihar was unanimous and that the Supreme Court upheld it on May 27 this year, and that it also upheld the Form 6 declaration.- Ends

Dipu Rai is an investigative and data journalist based in New Delhi focusing on data-driven stories on finance, health, politics and environment. He is also actively involved in analyses and visualisations of data at India Today's Data Intelligence Unit (DIU).

Dipu is well-versed in SQL, Python, R, Tableau and produces prototype visualisations quickly as per requirement. He is specialised in dealing with a variety of datasets with parsing, scraping and cleaning. Doing Spatial analysis is his hobby, and he frequently uses location intelligence platforms like Carto and QGIS.

After completing the master in economics, Dipu has started his career as a business journalist. He has more than ten years of experience in broadcast, print and digital platforms.

Dipu's work has sparked several financial investigations and won some of journalism's highest honours. He was awarded the Redink Award, in 2015 for financial crime reporting. He has translated Raymond Williams's book 'Television' in Hindi. His hobbies include reading codes, learning new visualisation techniques. In his spare time he likes to read books, listen to music and watch films.