New Delhi: R.S. Sharma, founding director general of Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI), which rolled out Aadhaar cards across India, has called the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists by the Election Commission of India (ECI) a technologically backward, outdated process and “ruinously expensive” process.Writing in the Indian Express, Sharma, a former secretary to the government of India, has said the methods used during SIR belong in the “19th century”.He is strongly critical of the effects of the outcome of the SIR process as well, saying that it “harasses the honest majority and cannot find the few it targets”.Sharma has described the verification process unde SIR as unduly expensive and said that the government should “stop spending thousands of crores every [election] cycle on a 19th-century method”.He has also said that the burden of the ECI’s errors falls the “hardest on the poor, the elderly, migrants and women” and says that now that some states are linking SIR deletions to welfare, “a wrongful removal can cost a family its rations and its pension”.Sharma writes that the process is “ruinously expensive, and by design it recurs”, meaning that it is not a one-off process but a continuous one.Another assertion by Sharma is about the ECI’s role in the election process. He says that after a May 27 Supreme Court order that the final determination of citizenship belongs to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs under the Citizenship Act, 2019 – and not to the commission – the only task for the latter was to verify the age of residents: “is the person 18 or older?”Sharma makes a case for Aadhaar-based authentication of voter ID cards instead of door-to-door voter verification by the election commission. He backs the SIR but only via Aadhaar. He writes that the government should validate the identity of voters using Aadhaar instead of doorstep verification (of the age of residents).His idea of linking Aadhaar with EPIC is not new and has many critics, who point out that Aadhaar verification has been prone to defects that have excluded lakhs from schemes, benefits, rights and projects whenever the government has used it to verify identity or eligibility. Sharma’s claim that Aadhaar helped de-duplicate PAN, close benami accounts and remove “crores of ghost beneficiaries from welfare, saving over Rs 2.7 lakh crore” is, therefore, a disputed one.However, his criticism of how ECI’s SIR process has rolled out echoes the concerns of many, including the Association of Democratic Rights, which approached the Supreme Court of India against the process in 2025 raising some of these issues.In its affidavit, ADR cited ground reports alleging that enumeration forms were being mass-uploaded by officials without voters’ consent to meet “unrealistic” deadlines.Former election commissioners have also said since the SIR started being rolled out that the ECI is supposed to assess voter eligibility (age) and operate with a view to including voters rather than excluding them. Sharma’s op-ed points out that 13 crore have been deleted in the SIR process so far, echoing the Supreme Court assertion that mass voter deletions would be taken note of.“If the draft list shows mass exclusion, bring it to the Court’s notice and it will intervene,” it had said, recommending that the ECI accept Aadhaar and other common documents, noting their “presumption of correctness” and asking it to focus on inclusion, not exclusion.The ECI has defended the SIR as a necessary exercise to clean the rolls, citing complaints from political parties about inaccuracies. It has resisted accepting Aadhaar and ration cards as primary documents, arguing they can be obtained fraudulently.Sharma responds to this with the claim that with a “small fraction” of the money required under SIR, Aadhaar linking would “clean the rolls faster, far more cheaply and with a fully auditable trail”.