Telangana SIR: ‘Not one illegal immigrant found on Hyderabad district’s electoral rolls’

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District Election Officer and Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Commissioner R.V. Karnan. File | Photo Credit: Nagara Gopal

The Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls (SIR) in Telangana has failed to detect even one illegal immigrant registered in the voters lists of the Hyderabad district’s 15 constituencies.

District Election Officer and Commissioner of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) R.V. Karnan has confirmed this, and said only a few Nepali citizens were found on the rolls, and they stand deleted.

“Though foreign nationals, we cannot call them illegal immigrants, as they have entered the country through legal route. But since they do not have citizenship here and hold their franchise back in Nepal, their inclusion in electoral rolls here is illegal, and we have removed their names,” Mr. Karnan said.

While exact number of such immigrants is not yet available, Mr. Karnan said 10 to 12 people were detected on the rolls of the Sanath Nagar Constituency. He categorically denied presence of Bangladesh nationals or Rohingya Muslims on the electoral rolls of Hyderabad district.

This trumps the narrative that illegal infiltrators into the city from Myanmar and Bangladesh have enrolled themselves as voters in the electoral rolls over the years compromising the sanctity of electoral process.

On November 2, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on his visit to the city, claimed that the SIR process has eliminated three crore illegal infiltrators from the electoral rolls.

The SIR 2026 has been designed with an additional component of mapping the voters with 2002 electoral rolls, with the express purpose of sifting out the infiltrators and ineligible persons from the voters list.

The electors were to fill in their details as they existed in the 2002 voters list, in order to prove their citizenship. Notices for appearance with documents to prove citizenship were issued to 32,36,659 electors who were declared as ‘unmapped’ though a large number of them had mapped themselves with 2002 rolls. Glitches in the ECINET software were cited as the reason for the mapping details not being uploaded onto the app.

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