Hyderabad: An estimated 7.77 lakh of the 19.41 lakh electors left off Hyderabad’s draft electoral roll carry Muslim names, according to an analysis by Siasat.com of the Election Commission’s (EC) own published lists. That is roughly 40 out of every 100 names dropped.
The analysis was prepared from the 4,094 polling-area PDFs the EC released alongside its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) draft roll of August 17. The 7.77 lakh is the central estimate. The true figure could run as low as 7.25 lakh or as high as 8.29 lakh, or between 37.4 and 42.7 per cent.
The EC has placed the 19,41,444 electors in four categories of Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD). Those who are on the list will not receive notices, unlike unmapped electors or those flagged for anomalies.
However, those on the ASDD list can fill out Form 6 to get back on the electoral roll if they are in India. Those living abroad can fill out Form 6A. They can do so during the claims and objections window that is open until September 16. The final roll is due on October 19.
2 in 5 names off the roll
Hyderabad went into the revision with 47,36,669 electors. The draft roll carries 27,95,225. The difference is 19,41,444, or 41 per cent of the roll the district started with.
That is the highest count of any district in Telangana. Rangareddy follows with 12,87,091 and Medchal-Malkajgiri with 10,71,566. Between them, the three districts of the Hyderabad urban belt account for 43 lakh of the 73.38 lakh names left off across the State, or nearly three in five.
For perspective, Telangana had 3,26,02,793 electors when it voted in the 2023 Assembly election, and 2,32,59,256 of them turned out. The 73.38 lakh flagged statewide amounts to about 22 per cent of that 2023 electorate. In Hyderabad, the exclusions run at almost double that rate.
Hyderabad’s roll had been growing until now. The Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) final roll of January 6, 2025, put Hyderabad at over 46.24 lakh, ahead of every other district in the state. By the time the revision began in June, the District Election Officer (DEO) was working with 47,36,669. By August 17, the draft roll showed 27.95 lakh.
Why the names came off
In the EC’s definitions, “absent” means the voter could not be found at the registered address, “shifted” means the voter appears to have moved away permanently, “dead” means the voter was reported or identified as deceased and “duplicate” means the elector appears to be enrolled in more than one place.
A reason is recorded against every one of the 19.41 lakh entries. Shifted accounts for 13,45,333, or 69 out of every 100. Absent accounts for 3,40,455, dead for 1,56,392 and duplicate for 99,264.
60 pc of the ‘duplicate’ exclusions carry Muslim names
The estimated Muslim-name share is not the same in each column. It is highest in the duplicate category, where an estimated 60 out of every 100 carry Muslim names, against 40 across all four reasons, Siasat.com’s analysis shows. Duplicate is the smallest of the categories.
Absent comes next at an estimated 45 out of every 100 and dead at 44.
Among the 13.45 lakh flagged as shifted, the largest group, with an estimated 37 out of every 100 carrying Muslim names. That is below the district average of 40.
Where the Muslim-name deletions are concentrated
Three assembly constituencies account for the bulk of Hyderabad’s Muslim-named deletions, Siasat.com’s analysis shows. Chandrayangutta has the largest number, an estimated 1.08 lakh of its 1,48,869 flagged electors. Bahadurpura follows with 1.05 lakh of 1,21,350 and Yakutpura with 89,000 of 1,54,982. Nampally, 81,000, and Karwan, at 77,000, are close behind.
The smallest counts are in the north of the city. Secunderabad Cantonment has an estimated 11,000 Muslim-name electors deleted on its draft list, Sanathnagar at 15,000 and Secunderabad 16,000.
By share rather than count, the order shifts at the top. Bahadurpura leads with an estimated 86 out of every 100 voters deleted carrying Muslim names in the draft list, ahead of Chandrayangutta’s 72 and Charminar’s 63. The bottom of the table are still Secunderabad Cantonment at 11, Sanathnagar at 13 and Secunderabad at 16.
The spread from 86 to 11 is largely a map of where Muslims live in Hyderabad. A list drawn from Bahadurpura will read differently from one drawn from Secunderabad Cantonment, which is why these figures describe the composition of the excluded lists and not the rate at which anyone was excluded.
Highest ‘duplicate’ deletions in Bahadurpura, Chandrayangutta
In all 15 assembly constituencies of Hyderabad, without exception, duplicate carries the highest estimated Muslim-name share of the four categories, Siasat.com’s analysis shows. It runs from 92 out of every 100 in Bahadurpura, 85 in Chandrayangutta and 84 in Yakutpura, down to 20 in Secunderabad Cantonment. In Musheerabad, where the overall share is 17, duplicate stands at 38 against 15 for shifted.
Yakutpura has the largest number of Muslim-name electors flagged as duplicate, an estimated 10,000, followed by Bahadurpura at 8,000 and Nampally at 7,000.
Shifted runs the other way. In 10 of the 15 seats, it carries the lowest Muslim-name share of the four categories, even though it is by far the largest, covering more than two-thirds of all exclusions in the district.
Bahadurpura records the highest Muslim-name share in all four categories – 88 out of every 100 deletions for shifted, 83 for absent and 82 for dead, alongside its 92 for duplicate. Secunderabad Cantonment records the lowest in all four, at 8, 12 and 20. Chandrayangutta and Bahadurpura are level when it comes to absent deletions at an estimated 25,000 each, with Charminar behind at 23,000. Yakutpura has the most flagged as dead, an estimated 10,000 of its 14,566 death entries.
The biggest lists and the smallest
Jubilee Hills tops the district for sheer size, with 1,79,510 electors left off, followed by Yakutpura and Chandrayangutta. At the other end, Charminar has the fewest at 94,174, with Secunderabad on 1,02,710 and Secunderabad Cantonment on 1,05,034, Siasat.com’s analysis shows.
Raw counts partly just measure how big a seat is. Set against each constituency’s own pre-revision roll, its draft-roll total plus the names flagged, the order changes. Musheerabad shed the largest proportion at about 45 in every 100 voters deleted in the draft list, followed closely by Sanathnagar, Malakpet and Jubilee Hills. The smallest was Bahadurpura at about 35, then Karwan at 37. No Hyderabad seat fell below a third.
The four reasons are not spread evenly across the city either. Jubilee Hills alone accounts for 1,48,859 shifted entries, the largest figure in any category in any Hyderabad assembly seat, and 83 out of every 100 of that constituency’s exclusions. Charminar has the fewest at 42,238 and the lowest share at 45.
On the other end, Chandrayangutta records the most absent deletions with 37,800, ahead of Charminar’s 36,086 and Karwan’s 35,498. But as a share of each seat’s own list, Charminar is the outlier, with 38 out of every 100 of its exclusions are recorded as absent, more than twice of Hyderabad’s figure of 17 and nearly six times Malakpet’s 6.5, the lowest in the district. Malakpet also has the smallest absent count at 9,646.
Dead is highest in Yakutpura at 14,566, then Goshamahal at 13,237 and Musheerabad at 12,901, with Sanathnagar by far the fewest at 4,172. Duplicate is led by Yakutpura with 11,860, Bahadurpura with 9,261 and Nampally with 9,039, against Secunderabad’s 3,002, Siasat.com’s analysis shows.
The full Telangana picture
The deleted population across the state is young and of working age. The largest single age band is 35 to 39, with 11,37,375 names deleted. Electors in their 30s account for 20.86 lakh of the 73.38 lakh, more than a quarter of the total. The mean age is 44.6. Men account for 37,01,808 and women 36,35,125, a near-even split.
Statewide, 27,864 electors recorded as dead are under 30, of whom 10,147 are under 25. Another 88,253 voters deleted in the deleted draft list are aged 18 or 19, meaning they can only have joined the roll in the last year or two. Of those, 14,012 are marked absent.
How Telangana compares to other states’ SIR
Telangana’s statewide rate of about 22 per cent is well above what Bihar produced when the EC ran the first SIR in 2025. Bihar entered that exercise with 7.89 crore electors and published a draft roll of 7.24 crore, dropping roughly 65 lakh names, a little over 8 per cent. Its final roll on September 30 carried 7.42 crore, a net fall of 5.95 per cent.
The second phase, covering nine states and three Union Territories (UT), removed 6.56 crore names from a combined base of 50.96 crore, close to 13 per cent. Uttar Pradesh accounted for 2.89 crore of those, 18.7 per cent of its roll. West Bengal dropped 58.21 lakh of 7.66 crore, and Rajasthan 41.84 lakh of 5.46 crore.
In the third phase, of which Telangana is part, the rates are generally higher. EC figures show Delhi’s draft roll cutting 47.7 lakh names, close to a third of the UT’s electorate. Karnataka stands at about 27 per cent, Maharashtra at 21.14, Haryana at 16 and Andhra Pradesh at 10.78.
Hyderabad, at 41 per cent, exceeds all of them.
Methodology and disclaimer
What the 40 per cent figure of Muslim-name deletions describes is the composition of the excluded list, such as who is on it, and nothing beyond that.
Indian electoral rolls carry no religion column as the law does not permit one. The analysis therefore works from names. A computer model was trained on Hyderabad’s rolls, which the EC publishes in English. The model reads each name token by token and returns a probability. Those probabilities are then averaged across a group.
There is a +/-2.7 per cent margin of error, which is why every figure in this series is published as an estimate with a range around it and why the district figure is written as 40 per cent within a band of 37.4 to 42.7.
(This is a multi-part series on the analysis of the Telangana and Hyderabad SIR. Stay tuned as we publish more in the coming days)
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