SIR deletes 73 lakh. Students? Prove it
A report claims “lakhs” of hostel students around Hyderabad were shifted out in SIR. The official record shows big deletions statewide — and zero student-specific counts.
The draft rolls contain a statewide deletion figure, but no student-specific count.
Content type: analysis
A claim doing the rounds says student voters living in hostels around Hyderabad were wiped from local rolls or pushed back to native constituencies during the Special Intensive Revision. The punchline missing from the claim: numbers, addresses, or documents that show it.
What is on the record is large. According to figures reported from the CEO’s briefing, 73,39,234 electors statewide didn’t make the SIR draft, marked as permanently shifted (45,18,961), absent/untraceable (11,25,546), deceased (9,22,230), dual (6,70,203) and other (1,02,294). The draft rolls were published on August 17. None of the consulted material breaks this down by students, hostels, or Hyderabad’s campuses.
The rules themselves undercut the sweeping allegation. The Election Commission’s student enrolment instruction, hosted by the Telangana CEO, says students in hostels or private accommodation may register either at their native place or at their present stay. The ERO handbook adds the ordinary-resident test: a student going home for holidays isn’t ordinarily resident in a hostel; an adult living there more or less permanently may be. In short: student status is not a magic pass or a disqualifier — the address and residence test decide it.
Urban messiness is real. The CEO has said Booth Level Officers in Hyderabad and Medchal faced address-mixing issues, and that missing names can be restored with Form 6. That explains how genuine voters — including hostel residents — could slip off a draft. It does not prove “lakhs” of Hyderabad students were shifted as a class, and the report alleging it supplies no roll extracts, ASDD entries or constituency-wise counts to test.
The CEO’s portal now hosts SIR draft rolls, ASDD lists and search tools. If hostel clusters around Hyderabad were gutted, the evidence will be in those rolls. Until someone publishes that work, “lakhs of student votes shifted” is still a line, not a figure.
What a Telangana reader needs — and hasn’t been shown — are Hyderabad/Medchal/Rangareddy roll comparisons for known hostel addresses, the ASDD tallies there, and how many of those entries were restored after claims. The state has put the datasets up. The sensational claimers can open them and count. We’ll wait.