Somebody – we don’t know who – decided that a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voters had to be conducted. The Election Commission of India (ECI) told RTI activist Anjali Bharadwaj that it did not have minutes of any meeting that decided upon the SIR. Somebody – we are now piecing this together – decided that Form 6 would be given to new voters to register during SIR but it would be altered so that they cannot do so without proving that their grandfather was also on the voter list decades ago. Somebody – and we don’t know who – invented a tool called ‘logical discrepancy’ and wrote algorithms to eliminate voters for 11 different reasons. More than 13 crore names were deleted from India’s electoral rolls thus. But we do know who built the digital system which helped that somebody do all this. It’s not a government department or company. It is a private company – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – whose parent group had, in the very years that it was building that system, become the single largest identifiable funder of the party running the government the system serves.None of that, by itself, proves wrongdoing. Companies build government software everywhere. In fact, TCS itself has done a tremendous job of building and running India’s passport system. Companies donate to ruling parties everywhere the law permits it. What is unusual is the scale of the overlap, the choices made by TCS – or thrust upon it – in building the system, and how little of it has been publicly examined. The corporate engine behind the curtainThe integrity of India’s electoral rolls has rested on a simple statutory design: decentralisation. The law gives Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) – usually local sub-divisional magistrates – the power to prepare, revise and verify rolls constituency by constituency, precisely so that no single office or official at Nirvachan Sadan, the Central Election Commission in Delhi, could have control of the national electorate and tamper with it.That design changed with ERONet, and later its successor platform, ECINet. Both were built not in-house, nor by any of the government’s own agencies, but by TCS. TCS’s own 2024-25 annual report describes ERONet 2.0 as a system that “revolutionised electoral roll management in India,” built around what the company calls a centralised database serving as the single source of truth for the election body.Also read: After Facing Flak Over Bulk Form 7s Being Filed to Seek Voter Deletions, ECI Sets Limit of 10 Applications For One PersonThe EC presents this as modernisation – a “decision-support system” for local officers. In practice, the software has come to decide what those officers may or may not do, overriding the constitutional or statutory mandate on many matters.The ‘Goa 97’ case shows exactly how. Local EROs heard the cases of 97 voters flagged during the SIR, examined their documents, and found them eligible – a finding the Supreme Court itself had directed be honoured. The software apparently had no function to record that decision. Between February 11 and 17, Goa’s state IT agency wrote eight times – not only to the EC but directly to TCS, the vendor – asking that a rollback feature be switched on so that the court’s order could be carried out before the SIR process in the state ended. The requests went unanswered. The final roll was published. The 97 voters were not allowed back onto the rolls. The law gives an ERO the power to enrol a voter. Now, under Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar’s system, the ERO has to depend on a private company to enable a checkbox so that he can perform his constitutional duty. In Goa, neither the EC’s central office in Delhi nor TCS, the private company involved, enabled the ERO to do his duty – despite several requests and reminders for access. Algorithmic deletionThe mechanism behind this is an algorithm the EC uses for “progeny-mapping” – matching a citizen’s family details against a baseline roll from 2002 and flagging anything that doesn’t fit as a “logical discrepancy.” The flagged categories include age gaps between parent and child that the software judges as too small, similar gaps with grandparents, siblings recorded as too close in age, more than six children mapped to one father, and names that were spelled differently by clerks two decades apart.The algorithm came close to striking Amartya Sen off the rolls. The 92-year-old Nobel laureate was summoned to prove himself after the software recorded the age gap between him and his late mother as under 15 years; a member of his household staff said her birth year in the records had been altered. When the opposition raised a stink that even Amartya Sen was being targeted, officials rushed to his home to redeem the situation. If a system can misfile a Nobel laureate’s mother, it is worth asking what it is doing, unwatched, to millions of ordinary families with no one to notice on their behalf.Uttar Pradesh offers a second look inside the machine. The Reporters’ Collective analysed the Form 7 deletion objections the state’s chief electoral officer (CEO) posted online. Of 87,127 filed by the commission’s own registration officers and their assistants, 85,854 – 98.5% – carry no reason at all; sixty-two contain only letters. Four officers told the Collective that when they declined to approve a voter after a hearing, ERONet generated the deletion form under their name and digital signature anyway. The law makes the ERO a quasi-judicial authority. The software made him the prosecutor, too. In Goa, the software would not let an officer enrol voters. In Uttar Pradesh, it made him sign off on deleting voters.The financial pipelineThe embedding of TCS inside the EC’s digital infrastructure must be seen alongside a second fact: since N. Chandrasekaran became Tata Sons’ chairman in February 2017, the Tata Group has become one of the ruling party’s largest financial benefactors, routing more than Rs 1,000 crore so far to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) through the Tatas’ Progressive Electoral Trust (PET).Hundreds of crores were donated to the BJP right before crucial elections. In the 2018-19 cycle, PET disbursed Rs 454 crore, of which Rs 356 crore, about 75%, went to the BJP. In 2024-25, after the Supreme Court struck down Electoral Bonds, the numbers surged: PET disbursed Rs 915 crore, and the BJP received Rs 757.6 crore of it – 83%, and by a wide margin the single largest sum from any donor to any party that year. The Congress received Rs 77.3 crore.Also read: ‘Was Ghosted’: Why Nisarga Adhikary Wrote to Election Commission and CERT-in in JulyTata Sons contributed Rs 308 crore to PET that year, and TCS itself Rs 217 crore. The April 2024 donation came only a couple of weeks after the Union government approved roughly Rs 44,000 crore in subsidies for two of the group’s semiconductor units, and just in time for the Lok Sabha elections.None of this proves that the donations and the semiconductor subsidies, or the donations and the EC software contracts, are connected. But the group whose subsidiary holds the keys to the country’s voter database is, simultaneously, the ruling party’s single biggest funder. That is a fact worth stating plainly and pondering over, independent of any theory about why.The boardroom at Bombay HouseThese facts sit against the backdrop of a reversal that has not been adequately explained. On August 12, Chandrasekaran told Tata Sons board he would not seek a third term when his tenure ended in February 2027 – a decision Tata Trusts formally accepted, triggering the start of a search for his successor. Three weeks later, on September 3, the company’s Nomination and Remuneration Committee asked him to reconsider. On September 17, he did: the board voted 4-to-1 to reappoint him for another five years, a stalemate between the Tata Trusts’ two nominee-directors broken by a casting vote that Chandrasekaran, chairing the meeting, cast for himself. Reuters reported that the reasons for the reversal were “not immediately clear.” Tata Trusts called the resolution “illegal” and “a legal nullity” the same day.Why a man announces his own departure and is, within three weeks, persuaded to reverse it – and why he then casts the deciding vote for his own continuation rather than recusing himself – is a fair question. There is no public evidence that the September reversal was directed by anyone outside Tata Sons’ own board and trust structure. But it is documented that the government has, earlier, taken a direct interest in exactly this question. In October 2025, during an earlier round of the same Tata Trusts-versus-Tata Sons rift, Noel Tata and Chandrasekaran met Union home minister Amit Shah at his residence in Delhi, where finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also joined them. A source quoted by PTI put the underlying concern plainly: whether the government could “let an individual take control” of a conglomerate this size. That meeting establishes that New Delhi has a channel into this dispute and an acknowledged interest in its outcome. Whether that channel was used again in September 2026 to ensure that Chandrasekaran stays at the helm is a matter that needs to be settled. What is established, without needing anyone’s help to explain it: whoever ends up running Tata Sons will run a company that builds India’s election software and funds its ruling party more heavily than any other donor, and may have to answer questions that will inevitably arise about ERONet. On a question with those stakes, a reversal nobody involved has explained, decided by a vote the chairman cast for himself, deserves more scrutiny than it has so far attracted. Questions TCS must answerWhen a private company’s software effectively overrides statutory authority and results in the mass exclusion of citizens from the electoral roll, that company – in this case, TCS – owes the country plain answers to plain questions:Who actually holds the power? Could the EC’s central IT office – and, by extension, TCS’s own system administrators – override, freeze or delete a decision made by a locally empowered officer without that officer’s sign-off? If so, wasn’t the officer’s legal authority reduced to a farce the moment the software went live? In Uttar Pradesh, who decided that an officer’s refusal to approve a voter would auto-generate a deletion form in his name and digital signature?Who wrote the family-tree rules? Were the specific thresholds used to flag a family – an age gap under 15 years with a parent, under 40 with a grandparent, under nine months between siblings, more than six children mapped to one father – devised by TCS’s own engineers, or handed to the company as a fixed specification by the EC? Either answer must name the EC official or TCS person who authored the specific thresholds. Also read: Across Class and Circumstance: 10 Stories of Delhi Voters Grappling with SIRWas it ever tested for bias? Before this was rolled out across 30 states and Union Territories and flagged millions of families, was the algorithm ever checked for whether it disproportionately caught migrant workers, the poor, or people whose names get transliterated differently by different clerks over 20 years? If that bias testing exists, TCS should publish it.Who ordered the change to Form 6? Two of the EC’s own three members recorded in writing that altering Form 6 required the Union government to first amend the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 – and that this hadn’t happened. TCS pushed the change to the live portal anyway. Who submitted that request, and did anyone check its legality first?Why couldn’t Goa be fixed? When a state’s CEO and its IT agency spent a week writing directly to both the Central Election Commission and to TCS asking for one missing feature so that 97 citizens the Supreme Court wanted restored could be restored, why did nothing happen? Did TCS fail to deliver, or was TCS told not to?Does anyone keep a record? Reputable technology companies keep logs of who changed what, and when. TCS must release its logs from the SIR period to an independent, public audit so that the country can judge whether what happened was incompetence or by instruction.The machine writing the codeI wrote recently that the SIR was part of a decade-long project, “The Inversion of Democracy,” arguing that the government had pulled almost every lever of the electoral machine into its own hands – the money, the umpire, the register of who may vote. Now, it seems that the digital tool used to capture the voter roll was built by a private company which, in those same years, was also the ruling party’s largest identifiable financier.India’s citizens are not simply being told who gets to choose their government. They are being sorted, flagged, included or excluded by machinery that neither they, nor in important respects parliament itself, can see inside. We are entitled to know who is writing the code, who is making the decisions on what that code should and shouldn’t be able to do. The Supreme Court must ensure that TCS answers these questions. S. Raghotham is a senior journalist and researcher based in Bengaluru.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.