The number of women voters in Bengal has fallen to its lowest in a decade following the SIR, data provided by the Centre in the Lok Sabha on Friday revealed.
While this is likely to change after the under-adjudication cases are settled, the figures also show that the women-to-men ratio among Bengal’s voters has slumped — a first in 14 years.
Immediately before the SIR, Bengal’s voter list showed 969 women for every 1,000 men — a historical record for the state. On the so-called “final” post-SIR list published on February 28, the ratio had fallen to 964, data provided by law and justice minister Arjun Ram Meghwal in Parliament showed.
This is the first time the ratio has dropped since 2012.
Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is believed to enjoy wide support among women voters because of her many welfare schemes tailored for the gender.
Citing the figures provided in Meghwal’s reply to Trinamool MP Rachna Banerjee in Parliament, Bengal’s ruling party has alleged a BJP conspiracy to exclude genuine women voters from the rolls.
A decrease in the voter gender ratio — the number of women per 1,000 men — has been a general feature of the SIR elsewhere, too, shrinking from 907 to less than 893 in Bihar last year.
Anecdotally, such reductions have been attributed partly to women changing their surnames after marriage. This has sometimes made it difficult to link their names to the previous SIR rolls, or match their names with pre-marriage documents — especially if the SIR officials have refused to exercise common sense or lacked local knowledge.
An analysis by The Hindu newspaper of all the electoral rolls released after the completion of this round of the SIR in eight states and three Union territories has found a sharp gender-ratio drop everywhere except the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Goa and Puducherry.
As for the absolute number of women voters in Bengal, it’s 3,16,40,585 on the February 28 rolls — the lowest since 2016 when it was 3,16,38,993.
One supplementary list naming 10 lakh among the over 60 lakh under-adjudication voters has been published — but without a breakup of how many have been approved and how many rejected. A second supplementary list was expected to be released late on Friday night.
The total number of voters on the February 28 rolls was 6,44,52,609, down from 7,63,96,165 in January 2025 after the special summary revision, Meghwal said.
Even if all the 60 lakh under-adjudication voters are approved — sources have suggested a rejection rate of 41 per cent so far — the number will be far lower than the pre-SIR figure.
This too should mark a change in the trend. The Bengal CEO’s report on the 2024 polls had cited “a consistent growth in E-P (electors to population) ratio over the last few revision(s)....”
The SIR in Bengal has differed from that in other parts of India in significant ways.
The Bengal government has objected to micro-observers — central government and public-sector employees —practically assuming the role of statutory electoral registration officers.
Nabanna has also alleged that some documents accepted in other states were not accepted in Bengal.
The biggest point of controversy, perhaps, has been the exclusion of voters using the umbrella category of “logical discrepancies” — encompassing a myriad issues from spelling errors, transliteration errors, and age differences between parents and children.
“Since day one, the BJP has targeted women voters as they have been with Mamata Banerjee because of a series of gender-specific development schemes,” Trinamool spokesperson Arup Chakraborty said.
“Recently, we heard a BJP leader asking party workers to confine women inside their homes during elections so that they cannot vote. The Election Commission has gone one step further and snatched their rights.”
CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said: “From the beginning of the SIR process, we had warned that the RSS-BJPcombine was aiming to remove marginalised people, including minorities and women. The data has exposed the truth, and our warninghas come true.”
State BJP chief spokesperson Debjit Sarkar, however, attributed the decreased gender ratio to alleged female foeticide in Bengal under Trinamool rule.
He didn’t explain why this should reflect in the rolls a mere 15 years — and not 18 years, the age for enrolment — after Mamata’s rise to power
“If the number of women voters has reduced, it is because of the TMC’s oppression of women and the rising trend of female foeticide in Bengal,” Sarkar said. “If this TMC government continues, the state will turn into Haryana.”
Haryana, with historically low sex ratios, happens to be a BJP-ruled state.
In the previous census of 2011, Haryana had 834 women to 1,000 men while Bengal had 950 women per 1,000 men.
Additional reporting by our Bengal Bureau