More women than men deleted from electoral rolls in Bihar during SIR: Data

An analysis of Bihar’s draft electoral rolls released on August 1, prepared after the completion of the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise, shows that more women than men have been deleted from the rolls.

A total of 3.82 crore male electors are part of the latest electoral rolls — about 25 lakh male electors fewer than the rolls prepared in January this year. A total of 3.41 crore female electors are part of the latest electoral rolls — about 31 lakh female electors fewer than the rolls prepared in January. The chart below shows the gender-wise number of electors in the January 2025 (before SIR) and August 2025 (post SIR) rolls in Bihar.

In fact, in 37 out of Bihar’s 38 districts, more women electors have been deleted from the rolls than men. In Gopalganj, the number of women electors fell from over 10 lakh in January to about 8.21 lakh in August — a 17.8% decline. In comparison, male electors in Gopalganj declined from over 10.37 lakh to 9.23 lakh — a drop of 11%.

This means that deletions among women were 6.8 percentage points more than those among men (17.8% minus 11%) in the Gopalganj rolls. This was the highest among all districts. Map 2 depicts the district-wise gender-gap in deletion rates.

The gender-divide in deletions raises many concerning questions. According to the Election Commission, the electors who are not part of the August list have either died, or are registered in multiple locations, or have permanently migrated out of Bihar, or are untraceable.

Death rates between men and women are generally similar. Death rate is defined as the number of deaths per thousand population in a given region and time period. The chart below shows male and female death rates in Bihar over the past five years.

Except during the pandemic — when male death rates briefly spiked above those for women — the trend has largely remained nearly equal. The number of deletions due to duplicate entries or untraceable addresses is likely to be relatively smaller.

This leaves one other major factor: out-migration from Bihar. Both anecdotal evidence and data suggest that when it comes to migrating out, men vastly outnumber women. The chart below shows the percentage distribution of migrants by location of their last usual place of residence, being the “same State” or from “another State” as recorded in PLFS 2020-21

In 2020-21, for every 100 male migrants in India, 31.4 had migrated from another State and 65.6 within the same State. In contrast, among 100 female migrants, only 7.2 had migrated from another State, while 92.6 moved within their home State. This pattern holds true for Bihar as well and perhaps it is even more stark for men from the State.

If men outnumber women in out-migration by this huge a margin, then why did more women get deleted than men in the post-SIR rolls? Given that deaths, the other major factor, cannot explain such a variance.

A plausible explanation is a gender gap in the submission of enumeration forms during the SIR exercise. As of 2019–21, only 55% of women in Bihar were estimated to be literate — the lowest female literacy rate in the country — compared to over 76% among men. Could such low literacy levels have hindered women from properly filling out and submitting the forms?

In yesterday’s Data Point, we found that more deletions occurred in districts where more women than men turned out to vote in absolute numbers, even though there were more registered male electors. We had suggested that these districts had higher out-migration of men. But deletions have been more among women. This suggests that the method of self-enumeration could have affected women, among whom there is a lower literacy rate, leading to their higher deletion rates.

More analysis of the SIR exercise will follow in these columns.

The data for the charts were sourced from the Election Commission of India, Sample Registration System (SRS) Bulletins, and Migration in India 2020-2021