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The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) commenced in Bihar under Election Commission of India (ECI) order no. 23/2025-ERS (Vol. II), dated June 24, 2025. Phase II followed on October 27, 2025, across 12 states and Union territories with about 51 crore electors, and Phase III, ordered on May 14, 2026, extends the exercise to the rest of the country including Delhi except Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, covering 19 states and UTs, including 36.73 crore electors. In Association for Democratic Reforms v Election Commission of India, 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the commission’s power to conduct the exercise subject to the safeguards of notice, hearing, a reasoned order and appeal. According to the communication of the United Nations Special Rapporteurs dated May 1, 2026, about 5.2 crore (52 million) names were removed in Phase II alone.

The ECI discontinued its documented de-duplication software during the Bihar SIR and deployed undocumented systems midway through Phase II. ERONET, originally built by C-DAC under  the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), has since 2023 been operated as ERONET 2.0 by Tata Consultancy Services, a fact the ECI never disclosed and the Reporters’ Collective established from shareholder filings. On December 29, 2025, the West Bengal chief electoral officer’s office admitted in writing that the flagging software was malfunctioning because the 2002 base data “had not been digitised accurately”.

Every determination in the exercise rests on a digitised copy of a two-decade-old paper roll. The only official confirmation that computation forms part of the decision chain is a line in the commission’s presentation providing for “Computer Matching/Linking with Last SIR by ECINET”. The same presentation records that booth level officers may match electors against an “All-India database”. The remainder of this record has been reconstructed from orders, press notes, affidavits, investigative reporting and litigation.

ECINET, launched on January 22, 2026, consolidates about 40 legacy applications behind a single login, used by electors to file enumeration forms and search the digitised legacy rolls. The booth level officer-app is the field instrument through which booth level officers digitise forms, record mapping outcomes and receive centrally distributed lists of flagged electors.

ERONET, the registration officers’ backend, was originally developed by C-DAC under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology; Reporters’ Collective has established that ERONET 2.0 has been operated since 2023 by TCS, an arrangement the ECI never disclosed by the ECI and located that is recorded only in the company’s shareholder disclosures, with officials describing a system that was “changing on the go” as the rules were revised mid-exercise.

The remaining layers are known only through journalism and litigation. A mapping algorithm linked current electors to the digitised legacy rolls, and unlinked electors were classified as “unmapped” and required to produce documents. When only about 3% of West Bengal’s electorate was returned as unmapped, the software was applied to mapped electors to flag “logical discrepancies”, marking 1.31 crore persons in West Bengal (17.11%) and 2.35 crore in Madhya Pradesh (41.22%).

A machine transliteration engine converted Bengali-script rolls into English before matching. The infrastructure also contains the Photo Similar Entry and........

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