The numbers were precise.
The answers to the queries were strikingly similar: “Record not maintained.”
As the controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls puts Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar under scrutiny, an older trail of official correspondence from Indore in Madhya Pradesh raises a pointed question: When voter names are deleted through a digital system, where are the records explaining those decisions? The applicant’s pursuit of the information has now reached the Madhya Pradesh High Court, which has directed the State Information Commission to decide his pending RTI appeal. The deletions predate the present SIR exercise. But the correspondence brings the broader debate over electoral transparency down to a concrete issue: the availability of records documenting changes to the voter list. The Madhya Pradesh High Court has directed the State Information Commission to decide a pending second appeal filed by the same applicant, former Indore councillor Dilip Kaushal. He also sought contractor agreements, work orders, backups and related correspondence. The replies arrived in June. The response from the Depalpur officer was categorical: “This office has not maintained any such digital record relating to ERO Net or the BLOs’ Garud app. The political backdrop is significant.
An RTI request concerning more than 1.36 lakh voter deletions cited across Indore district between January 5 and October 15, 2022, drew a recurring response from constituency election offices: “The requested digital records relating to the Garud app and ERO Net had not been maintained. The appeal had been pending since January 30, 2026. In his May 23, 2025 application, Kaushal sought material concerning entries made on Garud and ERO Net and decisions taken by Electoral Registration Officers. The district election office transferred the application to constituency officers on May 27. Officials in Indore-2, Indore-5, Rau and Sanwer gave substantially similar replies. The Indore-4 officer said the deletion process on Garud and ERO Net was routine work undertaken under Election Commission instructions, but the constituency office had not maintained the related video, DVD or other digital records sought. Of the district’s 1,36,552 deletions cited in Kaushal’s application, 28,391 were attributed to Indore-4 and 28,091 to Indore-5. Together, that accounts for 56,482 names across the two constituencies. Add Rau’s 21,346, and the figure rises to 77,828-nearly 57% of the total cited in the request. The application listed another 19,983 deletions in Indore-2, 12,102 in Indore-1 and 8,107 in Indore-3. Sanwer accounted for 8,531 and Depalpur for 2,214. Kaushal took the matter beyond Indore in a July 31, 2025 complaint to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, and Madhya Pradesh’s Chief Electoral Officer. He raised concerns over the handling of voter-deletion records across all 230 Assembly constituencies. In the 2023 Assembly election, the BJP won 163 seats against the Congress’s 66 and swept all nine constituencies in Indore district.
Justice Sandeep N Bhatt’s September 17 order requires the authority to decide the appeal on its merits and in accordance with law, “as expeditiously as possible”, preferably within 45 days of receiving a certified copy of the order, and communicate the outcome to Kaushal.
