SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
Hyderabad: An estimated 14.9 lakh voters with Muslim names, over half of them from Hyderabad alone, have been left out of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Telangana, an analysis by Siasat.com of the Election Commission of India’s own published lists has found.
That figure translates to 20.3 per cent of the Muslim names – 7.77 lakh in Hyderabad and 7.17 lakh across 32 other districts – likely to be deleted under the Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) category.
As many as 40 out of every 100 electors carrying Muslim names are left off Hyderabad’s draft SIR rolls. Across Telangana’s other 32 districts, the figure is 13 out of every 100, according to Siasat.com’s analysis of 36,335 PDF files.
The draft SIR list flagged 73,39,235 voters across 33 districts and 119 constituencies in the ASDD category, which is about 21.7 per cent shrink from the 2025 list in Telangana.
Overall, ‘shifted’ accounts for highest deletions
In the ECI’s definitions, “absent” means the voter could not be found at the registered address, “shifted” means the voter appears to have moved away permanently, “dead” means the voter was reported or identified as deceased and “duplicate” means the elector appears to be enrolled in more than one place.
In Telangana, out of the 73.3 lakh likely deleted voters, shifted accounts for 45,18,541 names, or 61.6 per cent. As many as 12,27,503 have been marked as absent, or 16.7 per cent. Dead covers 9,22,142, or 12.6 per cent, and duplicate 6,70,064, or 9.1 per cent.
There is immense variation in the districts. For instance, 28.6 per cent of all flagged voters in Nizamabad have been categorised to be deleted as absent, but just 1.4 per cent in Hanumakonda. A total of 33.1 per cent of flagged voters in Peddapalli have been categorised as duplicate, against 3.4 per cent in Medchal-Malkajgiri.
Hyderabad has the highest exclusion of Muslim names
Hyderabad has the largest deletions of the electorate in Telangana’s draft SIR rolls, with 19,41,444 left off, as well as the steepest exclusion rate of 42 per cent of its total voters. Among them, 40 out of every 100 left off the list have Muslim names. Within the district, the duplicate list has the highest Muslim-name exclusions at 60.3 per cent, 45.5 per cent in absent and 44.2 per cent under the dead category. Shifted, the largest category by far by sheer number, has the lowest share at 36.7 per cent
Siasat.com has reported Hyderabad and its 15 constituencies separately. You can read the copy here.
Nizamabad, Nirmal, Adilabad have high Muslim name exclusions
Among the other 32 districts of Telangana, Nizamabad has the largest share of deletions of Muslim names in the ASDD category, Siasat.com‘s analysis shows. An estimated 32 out of every 100 of its 2,11,032 excluded electors carry Muslim names. That works out to an estimated 68,000 people.
Nizamabad, which has six Assembly constituencies, will see its overall voter list reduce by 14.7 per cent in Telangana’s SIR exercise.
In the shifted category in Nizamabad, where 71,467 electors have been flagged, 27.1 per cent carry Muslim names. In the absent list, which accounts for 60,258 electors – or 28.6 per cent of flagged names in the district, as well as the highest absent share in any of the 32 districts outside Hyderabad – 46.7 per cent have Muslim names.
In the duplicate category in Nizamabad, where 45,672 have been flagged, Muslim names make up 30.6 per cent. In the dead list, out of 33,635 electors, the Muslim-name share is 18 per cent.
Nirmal is second in Muslim-name exclusions at an estimated 25.8 per cent of its 1,13,170 exclusions, or around 29,000 people. In the shifted category in the district, where 41,719 electors have been flagged, 21.6 per cent carry Muslim names. In the absent list of 26,661 electors, 23.6 per cent of the district’s flags, the share rises to 46.7 per cent, matching Nizamabad as the highest absent figure among the 32 districts.
In the duplicate category, covering 17,926 electors, Muslim names account for 20.7 per cent. In the dead list of 26,864, the share is 14.7 per cent, the district’s lowest.
Adilabad is third at an estimated 23.5 per cent of 63,159 exclusions, or around 15,000 people with Muslim names. In the shifted category in the district, where 30,305 electors have been flagged, 20.9 per cent carry Muslim names. In the absent list of 11,950, which is 18.9 per cent of the district’s ASDD list, 39.1 per cent have Muslim names.
In the duplicate category, covering 7,548 electors, the Muslim-name share is 25.4 per cent. In the dead list of 13,356, it falls to 14.4 per cent.
The common thread in the Muslim-name exclusion across all three districts is absent, the reason that records that an elector could not be traced at the registered address. In each district, it carries much of the highest Muslim-name share of the four categories.
With three Assembly constituencies, Nirmal’s total electorate will reduce by 15.2 per cent post the SIR exercise, while Adilabad will lose 13.7 per cent names in its two constituencies.
Middle districts are where biggest numbers are, and smallest gaps
The two districts around Hyderabad produced enormous exclusion lists, but a much smaller share of Muslim-name deletions, Siasat.com‘s analysis shows. Rangareddy lost 12,87,091 names – 35.1 per cent of its roll – with an estimated 13.5 per cent carrying Muslim names. Medchal-Malkajgiri lost 10,71,566, or 36.3 per cent, with an estimated 9.3 per cent of names identified as Muslim. Together with Hyderabad, these three urban districts account for 43,00,101 of the state’s 73.3 lakh exclusions, nearly three in five.
Elsewhere in Mahabubnagar, of the 103,086 deleted voters under ASDD, 19.7 per cent have Muslim names. In Vikarabad’s 210,297 excluded voters, 19.4 per cent carry Muslim names. In Sangareddy, Muslim names account for 17.5 per cent of the 2,97,931 electors left off the rolls, while in Kamareddy (84,268 excluded) that percentage is 17.2 and Kumaram Bheem Asifabad (48,139) 16.9 and Jagtial (74,738) is 15.2 per cent.
In Warangal, of the 98,413 in the ASDD category, 13.7 per cent carry Muslim names. In Karimnagar, 13.6 per cent of the 1,77,102 excluded have Muslim names. In Medak (42,936 flagged) and Hanumakonda (1,01,697) both, that percentage is 13.3. In Narayanpet, where 76,360 electors were flagged, the Muslim-name share is 13 per cent.
Lower still are Wanaparthy at 10.8 per cent, Siddipet at 10.5, Khammam at 10.2, Peddapalli and Nalgonda both at 9.5, Suryapet at 8.8, Mancherial at 8.6, Nagarkurnool at 8.5 and Bhadradri Kothagudem at 8.4 per cent of those excluded carrying Muslim names.
The three lowest districts with Muslim name exclusions
Jayashankar Bhupalpalle records the lowest estimated share in the state of exclusions with Muslim names at 4.5 per cent of its 35,918 voters in the ASDD category. Jangaon follows at 5.6 per cent of 63,891 and Mulugu at 5.9 per cent of 27,842 excluded electors.
All three are also small districts with lower overall exclusion rates, Siasat.com‘s analysis shows. Jangaon lost 8.4 per cent of its electorate in the SIR exercise, Mulugu 11.8 per cent and Jayashankar Bhupalpalle 12.9 per cent. The smallest shrinkage in voter rolls anywhere in the state is Yadadri Bhongiri’s 5.7 per cent.
The age factor
Those left off the draft roll in Telangana in the ASDD category are overwhelmingly of working age, Siasat.com‘s analysis revealed. The single largest band is 35 to 39, with 11,37,375 names. Electors in their 30s account for 20.85 lakh of the 73.3 lakh, more than a quarter of the whole list.
The 40s follow with 16,50,882, then the 50s with 10,17,201 and those aged 21 to 29 with 10,65,719. Together, electors between 21 and 59 make up close to three-quarters of everyone flagged.
At the two ends, 13,59,971 electors above 60 have been flagged, and 1,58,718 aged 18 to 20 – voters young enough that most can only have joined the roll in the last year or two.
The mean age is 44.6. The sex split is close to even, with 37,01,808 men and 36,35,125 women.
Methodology and disclaimer
Indian electoral rolls carry no religion column. The law does not allow one. The analysis therefore works from names.
A model reads each name piece by piece and returns a probability.
In Hyderabad, that model was graded by a person. A blind sample of 1,500 names was hand-labelled: 537 read as Muslim, 921 did not, and 42 could not be settled either way. On genuinely hard names, the model is right about 77 times in 100.
For the other 32 districts, the ECI published only Telugu script, so the names had to be written into English letters by the project’s own tool, which was built on Hyderabad. No name outside Hyderabad has ever been checked by a person.
Those districts therefore carry a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points. Some Muslims carry names the model will not recognise and some non-Muslims carry names it will.
(This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on the analysis of the Telangana and Hyderabad SIR. Read Part 1 here. Stay tuned as we publish more in the coming days)
SOURCE : SIASAT
