Why is SIR disenfranchising migrant workers like us who built Delhi?

I was eight or nine years old when my parents came to Delhi from Jharkhand in search of work in 1989. Since then we have been residents of Indira JJ Colony in North West Delhi. 

I grew up seeing workers like my parents struggle for livelihoods and existence in this city, and unionise for survival. As I accompanied my parents to workers’ meetings, I slowly understood that, like everyone else, we deserved our ration, voting rights, and the right to reside in this city with dignity. 

Since 2006, I am the president of Gharelu Kamgar Welfare Trust and Gharelu Kamgar Union Delhi, and we help workers advocate for their rights. We fight for fair payment for domestic workers and construction workers, demand worker pensions, help them with necessary documentation, and lobby for their access to electoral rights. 

For long, we knew that we had to secure Aadhaar and voter ID cards for people so that they are eligible for voting and can continue to access welfare schemes. But the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has changed everything. Meant to be a nationwide voter registration and verification drive, it has become a tool to disenfranchise the most marginalised. 

Much before SIR came to Delhi, we had started conducting meetings to discuss its impact on people. We were assessing the conditions in other states. While this helped our people learn about SIR in advance, it did little to prepare them for the chaos that followed. 

Hundreds of people in our bastis can’t find their names on the SIR list. They are scared for their future and angry that they are going through this humiliation.

Many workers here are migrants from states such as Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal and have called Delhi their home for decades. This includes women who are listed as head of family on ration cards. How will they suddenly bring proofs from the lands they long left behind? If their names are deleted from electoral rolls, will their families go hungry? 

Besides, migrants from Jharkhand have a peculiar problem. Their state was carved out of Bihar in 2000, and the names of several people didn’t reflect in the SIR list of Jharkhand in 2002–03. My husband migrated from Hesag village in Gumla; many people from his village are missing from the SIR list of that year.

In our bastis, the SIR documentation work has also fallen on the already overworked anganwadi workers; the block-level officers (BLOs) don’t even visit our bastis. We are supposed to go to anganwadi centres with printouts of our names in the SIR rolls from 2002–03 and get ourselves registered. The centres haven’t even been provided with computers for people to go and check their names online. We are just told that there’s an app, but not everyone can use apps. People end up falling for scams, such as cyber cafes promising to find their names for INR 200–300.

We have gone to BLOs with our complaints, but they just say, “SIR is mandatory. We have pressure on us too.” Their solution to our issue is that we go to the village headman and get it in writing that we are legitimate residents of our erstwhile villages. How many headmen have come and gone in these years?

We, the domestic workers and construction workers, have built this city. Why are we so often asked to prove our citizenship and our right to live in these neighbourhoods? If all workers are forced to leave Delhi, will the city survive?

Sunita Rani is the founder-president of Gharelu Kamgar Welfare Trust. 

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Know more: Learn how voter deletion in West Bengal is erasing access to welfare.