In a significant challenge to updating the electoral roll in Uttar Pradesh's Gautam Budh Nagar district, officials have discovered that a staggering half of all voter enumeration forms submitted are currently unmapped. This means that out of 18.6 lakh voters in the district, approximately 50% are not yet linked to the foundational 2003 electoral roll, slowing down the crucial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process.
Root of the Problem: Incomplete Forms and Legacy Data
The core issue lies in the submitted forms themselves. For a voter to be successfully mapped, their name or that of their progeny must appear on the 2003 electoral roll. However, a large number of forms were left with key sections incomplete. Voters either did not declare if they were on the last roll, omitted details of their children, or left mandatory fields blank. This has created a massive data gap that the administration is now scrambling to bridge.
To tackle this, the district administration has formed 15 special teams. These teams are actively assisting voters in linking their current details to the 2003 voter roll, which remains the base dataset for all verification. Additional District Election Officer and Noida ADM, Atul Kumar, explained the on-ground effort. He stated that Booth Level Officers (BLOs) are now calling voters directly while filling forms to help with the mapping.
"It is possible that the voter did not know how to search their father or grandfather's name in the electoral roll," Kumar said. "The BLOs are helping them out, as the 2003 electoral roll has now been made into a searchable format online."
Push Through Camps and Tech Upgrades
The district has completed digitising 75% of the collected forms so far. Among these, officials note that around 12% belong to voters who are absent, have shifted, or are deceased. A recent technological upgrade is proving vital: the Election Commission added a new feature to the BLO app that displays the voter's contact number, a facility not available earlier, making direct outreach much easier.
A series of large-scale camps held across the district this week provided a major boost. These camps improved mapping rates from 5% to 11% and led to the collection of an additional 3% of enumeration forms on the spot. During these camps, lists of voters with uncollected forms or pending mapping were announced and displayed at offices, universities, industries, and residential clusters.
"The voters would come and even the BLAs were helping us trace the voters, which helped increase the mapping and collect the forms," Kumar added. The awareness drive has also increased calls to the district's SIR control room, which now receives at least 200 queries daily, up from about 150 last week.
Senior Oversight and Focus on Finalisation
With the clock ticking, the focus for the next few days is squarely on clearing the backlog of unmapped cases to finalise the rolls without discrepancies. The process has drawn attention from top election officials. UP Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa and Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Manish Garg visited polling booths and localities in Noida on Thursday to assess field preparations.
They also inspected the centralised control room in Sector 94, reviewing the mapping work done by BLOs and coordinators. Garg and Rinwa provided guidance for timely completion, stressing rigorous quality checks at every stage and seamless coordination between teams to maintain transparency. Garg had earlier instructed officials to accelerate work in slower constituencies while adhering to strict quality standards during data mapping and reporting.
The district's effort now hinges on this final push to link hundreds of thousands of voters to the legacy roll, ensuring an accurate and clean voter list for the future.
