Hyderabad: The month-long house-to-house enumeration of voters under the third phase of the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls in the country began in Telangana on Thursday (June 25), with 89.88 lakh electors already flagged for ‘anomalies’ in their data.Electors are to fill in their particulars in the enumeration forms the Election Commission (EC) will distribute and collect until July 24, including details of theirs or their relatives’ names as listed in the 2002 voter rolls. Though this process marks the start of the SIR’s public-facing phase, election officials had conducted a preliminary exercise over the past few months where they matched existing voters with the 2002 rolls.At 99.64 lakh, Telangana has a substantial number of electors who are unmapped to the 2002 rolls, making up 29% of the state’s 3.38 crore-strong electorate. Of the state’s 2.39 crore mapped electors, 89.88 lakh or 37.67% were flagged for anomalies.Telangana is among the 16 states and three Union territories where the EC is carrying out the third phase of its nationwide SIR, where unlike in other kinds of voter roll revision, it prepares a fresh list from scratch. Here the EC is scheduled to publish the draft voter rolls on July 31 and the final ones on October 1. The interim period is meant for the filing and disposal of claims for, and objections against, inclusions into the rolls.EC identifies lakhs of electors with ‘anomalies’, especially in and around HyderabadElection officials in Telangana identified as many as 11 types of ‘anomalies’ in voter data they encountered during their pre-SIR mapping in the state. Salient among these are cases including:Electors sharing the same parent but being less than nine months apartElectors listed as having an age difference of less than 15 years with a parent as identified in the 2002 rollsElectors listed as having an age difference of more than 50 years with a parent as identified in the 2002 rollsElectors listed as having an age difference of less than 40 years with a grandparent as identified in the 2002 rollsElectors having a parent’s name spelled differently in the current and the 2002 rollsElectors mapped with a different relative in the current and the 2002 rollsElectors mapped with their father in the current rolls and with their husband in the 2002 rollsElectors’ whose father’s name appears differently in the current and the 2002 rollsElectors present in the current and the 2002 rolls but having an inconsistent ageChief electoral officer (CEO) C. Sudharshan Reddy over the weekend had expressed the hope that 80% of anomalies could be corrected during the SIR.Hyderabad district accounted for the highest number of unmapped voters at 25.24 lakh. The highest number of electors with anomalies was recorded in the adjoining Rangareddy district – which includes parts of the city’s bustling IT corridor – at 11.44 lakh. Hyderabad came second at 8.66 lakh and the Medchal-Malkajgiri district, which encompasses Hyderabad’s northern and eastern suburbs, third at 8.46 lakh.Medchal-Malkajgiri also recorded the highest proportion of mapped electors with anomalies at 65% as of Saturday. However only 43.67% of the district’s electors were mapped to the 2002 rolls at the time.Although the EC kicked off the SIR in Bihar last June, months before the assembly elections there, it prominently flagged such ‘anomalies’ starting in the second phase of the revision in West Bengal, where it identified 1.34 crore of the state’s 7.7 crore electors as having similar “logical discrepancies” in their data.In Bengal too electors had to explain minor variations in spelling – a common thing in India – to election officials and those flagged for ‘logical discrepancies’ include the state’s (now former) chief secretary Nandini Chakravorty herself, India team cricketer Richa Ghosh and Kargil War veteran Mohammad Dual Ali.Ultimately some 27 lakh people put under the scanner for logical discrepancies in Bengal were unable to vote in the April assembly elections for the unprecedented reason that the post-SIR appellate tribunals were not given enough time to process their appeals for inclusion. Now the state’s BJP-led government has said it will exclude those removed from the voter list from its welfare schemes.Anganwadi workers struggle to scan forms, health staff to be busy with polio programmeBooth-level officers (BLOs) began distributing physical enumeration forms to Telangana’s electors on Thursday but the launch of the SIR ran into a few hurdles right out the gate, with some BLOs not receiving forms on time, especially in parts of Hyderabad.However, one major issue concerns the state’s Anganwadi workers who were deployed as BLOs, as the phones supplied to them by the government are equipped only to enter Anganwadi-related data and could not scan the QR codes on enumeration forms using the EC’s SIR app.The Union government’s national Pulse Polio immunisation drive from June 28 to July 1 may prove to be another bottleneck for the exercise as a major chunk of health staff drafted as BLOs will not be available. The government has mandated the universal coverage of two drops of the polio vaccine to children under five years of age during the four-day period.High court hears challenge to EC’s Telugu-only enumeration form policyAlthough BLOs across the state are distributing enumeration forms, outside of the core Hyderabad area these are printed only in Telugu, the state’s first official language that is spoken by three-quarters of its population.This was anticipated to create hurdles in Hyderabad given the city’s sizeable Urdu-speaking and other linguistic minorities (about 43% of Hyderabad district speaks Urdu), as well as the fact that many younger Telugu speakers do not read or write in the language.After political parties expressed serious concern the EC last week allowed for English enumeration forms to be distributed in the district. However, those parts of Hyderabad city falling in the adjoining Medchal-Malkajgiri and Rangareddy districts will not receive English forms.Meanwhile on Thursday, the Telangana high court heard a petition challenging the printing of enumeration forms only in Telugu, with the petitioner reportedly alleging that the EC took the decision to aid in deleting the votes of the state’s linguistic minorities.Justice Pulla Karthik agreed that not everyone in the state may be able to read the language and sought the EC counsel’s response, The Hindu reported. The latter responded that electors can download English and Urdu enumeration forms from the poll body’s website but the petitioner retorted that voters ‘cannot be at the mercy of BLOs’, per the newspaper. The court will next hear the matter on Monday.According to the 2011 census, 12% of Telangana’s population speaks Urdu and 1.52% speaks Hindi, while 5.55% speak Lambadi. Some 5% speak various other languages.Political parties prepare to keep vigilAll of the state’s political parties have sought to make their leaders and cadre vigilant against the exclusion of those they identify as likely to vote for them. Chief minister A. Revanth Reddy and Telangana Congress committee president B. Mahesh Kumar Goud on Wednesday held a Zoom meeting with ministers, MPs, MLAs and in-charges of assembly constituencies to warn them of what they alleged is the possibility of the BJP trying to weed out the votes of secular persons.Revanth Reddy said the performance of the leaders in creating awareness among voters will be assessed in the first ten days of SIR. If they fail to live up to the Congress’s expectations, they will be replaced, he said. The party’s Telangana in-charge Meenakshi Natarajan asked leaders to set up camps in villages to help voters map themselves.A delegation of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi led by MLC Dasoju Sravan Kumar submitted a memorandum to CEO Sudharshan Reddy on Wednesday, seeking special attention to the exercise in Telangana as this was the first SIR in the state after the bifurcation of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh.The delegation said the electoral rolls of Telangana and the residuary Andhra Pradesh have been impacted by the continuing migration and inter-state movement of voters on a large scale since the undivided state was bifurcated in 2014. Therefore, this was a key opportunity to identify, verify and eliminate duplicate voters to uphold the principle of “one person, one vote”, the party said.The state council of the Communist Party of India (CPI) had earlier organised a round-table meeting of all party leaders, which demanded the production of results from the pre-SIR mapping of voters at gram sabhas and ward-level congregations. CPI state secretary K. Sambasiva Rao expressed anguish that political parties are worried over the large number of ‘anomalies’ in the voter lists and that ‘many sons of soil are now forced to prove their bonafides’.Hyderabad MP and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi took up a campaign in the narrow lanes of the old city of Hyderabad to sensitise voters about the danger of their names being deleted from the rolls. Speaking to residents from a megaphone, he criticised the BJP for playing the communal card ahead of the exercise.For its part the BJP in Telangana – as elsewhere – has positioned the SIR as a means of deleting ostensible ‘Pakistani’, ‘Bangladeshi’ and ‘Rohingya’ names from the voter rolls, even as the EC despite citing undocumented immigration at the start of the Bihar SIR is yet to reveal how many such persons it has detected.With inputs from Anirudh S.K.