4 min readMumbaiUpdated: May 2, 2026 06:37 AM IST
As Maharashtra struggles to complete the pre-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) mapping exercise – a time-consuming process that requires Booth Level Officers or BLOs to match every current voter’s name against a 24-year-old electoral roll – the state’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has written to the Election Commission of India (ECI) seeking permission to allow voters to map themselves online, on the lines of the self-enumeration option introduced for the national census.
At present, the pre-SIR activity involves BLOs comparing the 2002 electoral roll with the current one. Every voter’s name must be traceable to the 2002 list to pass scrutiny. Young voters, whose names would not appear in the 24-year-old roll, must show that their parents’ names were on it.
The exercise is made more complex by a new category the EC has called “logical discrepancy” under which a voter can be excluded from the roll if, for example, her or her parent’s name appears differently in the 2025 roll versus the 2002 one. The recently concluded SIR in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal also threw up cases where multiple voters had listed the same person as their father.
With urban areas like Mumbai Suburban, Pune and Thane lagging at less than 50 per cent completion, meaning BLOs have so far been able to match fewer than half their voters to the 2002 roll, against a state average of 66.42 per cent, the CEO’s office has proposed giving voters the option of mapping their own names.
“Yes, I have sent the letter. We are yet to hear from the ECI about the proposal,” Maharashtra CEO S Chockalingam said.
The idea of self-mapping has emerged from the self-enumeration option made available in the national census. For Maharashtra, a 15-day window prior to the start of the house-listing period has been scheduled for self-enumeration, running from May 1 to May 15, 2026.
Any one member of a household may complete the process and furnish household details in approximately 15-20 minutes, after which a Self-Enumeration ID will be generated and shared on the registered mobile number or email. No documents are required to be uploaded. “A similar process can be adopted for pre-SIR work. However, details can be finalised once we get the approval from the ECI,” another election official said.
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The proposal comes at a significant moment given that the ECI is yet to announce the SIR schedule for the remaining states, and Maharashtra has already written to the EC seeking more time to complete the exercise. As first reported by The Indian Express on April 12, CEO Chockalingam wrote to the poll panel on November 25 flagging that the prescribed timeline was too tight.
Maharashtra is among the top three states by voter base, with over 9 crore electors in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls – the second highest in the country after Uttar Pradesh. The November 25 letter pointed to the SIR-2002 exercise in Maharashtra, which ran from November 2001 to December 2002, lasting 13 months and which, sources said, could not be completed within its original schedule precisely because insufficient time had been given for hearing and sorting objections.
Among districts still lagging in pre-SIR mapping are Mumbai City (51.40%), Nagpur (55.57%), Raigad (57.80%) and Palghar (59.28%), while 14 districts have completed 80 to 90 per cent of the work and 13 districts have completed 70 to 80 per cent. Officials said self-mapping could particularly help urban areas, which have seen population increases due to migration and where BLOs face a heavier workload.
