Kolkata’s pavement dwellers, many with Aadhaar, PAN and even voter cards, say they were not contacted for the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision ahead of the 2026 West Bengal polls.
Experts stress homelessness is no bar to voting and BLOs must verify people at their sleeping sites.
But officials admit there was no specific directive to include this invisible electorate.
Thousands of pavement dwellers in West Bengal may have been silently disenfranchised during the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections concluded April 29, 2026.
Many of these citizens reportedly were not made part of the Election Commission of India's (ECI) much-vaunted Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, this correspondent found. This population is beyond the over 9 million people whose names were deleted from the electoral rolls in the state.
Some 2.7 million of the deleted voters were 'mapped' initially but were later removed for ‘logical discrepancy’. These people will now be part of a judicial process to get back their voting rights that may take years to come.
However, the pavement dwellers did not fall in either the ‘unmapped’ or ‘mapped’ categories of SIR. “As per our information, there has been no specific effort to include the pavement dwellers in the voting roll; which is unfortunate,” pointed out Sabir Ahamed, a researcher representing Saber Institute that has been closely analysing the SIR process over the last few months.
According to the 2011 Census of India, there are 1.77 million homeless people in India, a figure that is likely to have reached 2 million at present. In West Bengal, the homeless population is 134,040, with more than half in Kolkata and the rest in North 24 Parganas, Howrah and South 24 Parganas districts, the Census data showed. While the official number of homeless people in Kolkata is 70,000, independent studies indicate that the number may reach up to several hundred thousand, depending on how "homelessness" is classified.
Among the families across the city who live on pavements, a majority did not get an SIR-related call, barring the few who were mapped in their erstwhile localities with which they still have some connection.
Sabita Mandal (68) has been living on a pavement near Golpark in south Kolkata for the last seven years. Since morning on election day, she watched people queuing up at a nearby polling booth. She has a voter card but no one came to her ahead of the elections to verify her papers, said the elderly lady with partial blindness inside a tarpaulin shed she shares with her frail husband.
Mandal is not an exception but a rule for most pavement dwellers in Kolkata and rest of the state, many of whom have valid identification documents like Aadhar and PAN cards.
Jamuna Kapadia was raised on the road and now has completed her graduation from a nearby college, where she was awarded for her exemplary work. She knew some political workers who helped her get her name on the voter list.
But Bapi Pal, living under the Gariahat Bridge about half a kilometer away, was not so fortunate. “I have been living here since before the bridge came up in late 90s, but nobody came to me for SIR. I have all the documents possible, excepting my death certificate," he said with a chuckle.
Kabita Bahadur, who lives under the same bridge, shared she doesn't have a voter identification card, despite having Aadhaar and PAN. "No one came to me for SIR,” she told this reporter.
Many of the pavement dwellers shared a harsher reality. “In any way, we barely exist; how can we show so many documents?" one of them said, pointing out that even if they had been call for SIR verification, it might not have been possible to produce the documents. "First, we never have many of the papers. Then, a number of them got lost when there was widespread waterlogging in the area."
A middle-aged pavement-dweller near Ballygunge Phari said many of their documents get damaged when the police and corporation people come to evict them. "Why can't the election commission consider our cases favourably? Are we not Indian citizens?”
Kapadia shares the plight. “Many of my documents got lost. How is it possible to conserve the papers while dealing with the kind of difficulties that we face?"
However, election candidates came to them seeking votes, they said. “See the irony, candidates from several parties came to us seeking votes, not perhaps didn't know that we are not on the electoral rolls. We did not tell anything to them, just enjoyed the attention,” said a woman living next to Kabita.
Multiple senior officials of ECI as well as booth-level officers (BLO) told this correspondent, on condition of anonymity, they received no directive to include the pavement dwellers in the SIR process. Till the time of publication, queries to the ECI chief executive officer in the state, Manoj Agarwal, went unanswered.
Pavement dwellers are as eligible to vote as any other Indian citizen because housing status is not a ground for disqualification, noted experts. “No documentary proof of residence is mandatory for homeless applicants. In Form 6, the application form for voter registration, if no standard address proof is available, the BLO must conduct field verification, by visiting the location, like a specific pavement, streetlight, flyover or night shelter at night, often multiple times, to confirm the person actually sleeps or resides there. Once verified, they can be enrolled,” said Kallol Bose, a senior lawyer.
Biswajit Mukherjee, a retired chief law officer in a West Bengal government department, ratified the view. “Being a pavement dweller does not rob one of one's voting right. Rather, the election commission should make extra efforts to include them in the voter roll.”
“However, the fact is, during the last SIR process, there was no effort to include these marginalised populations, many of whom are vagabonds, beggars or work in the unorganised sectors like brick fields, construction sites, small industries,” added Mukherjee.
Debasish Sen, a former chief election commissioner in West Bengal, concurred. “When I was in charge, we introduced a system to enrol the pavement dwellers linking their presence in context to nearest lamp post.” According to sources, in areas like Delhi, addresses like "House Number 0" or locations under flyovers or streetlights have been used in voter lists for marking the pavement dwellers.
Former Union Law Minister DV Sadananda Gowda had said in the Parliament in 2015 that "being homeless is not a disqualification for enrollment (as a voter)" and reassured that the ECI strives to enroll every eligible citizen in a written response. The law ministry is the administrative ministry for the election commission. The ECI's Manual on Electoral Rolls also explicitly covers "homeless / pavement dwellers" under ordinary residence determination.
"There are many of pavement dwellers in my constituency and ECI's SIR process made no effort to include them in the electoral process. At least I am not aware of any such initiative," said Javed Ahmed Khan, a minister in last government and a Trinamool Congress candidate from Kasba constituency.
Representatives from other political parties also agreed that there has been no mechanism to bring the eligible homeless voters into the fold, at least not one that was publicised.