India, Oct. 28 -- The freshly announced special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories is orders of magnitude larger than the previous iteration in Bihar, and is likely to cover roughly half of India's electorate. In large and politically sensitive states such as Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, the exercise might turn into a flashpoint and an electoral issue. A major difference (from the Bihar effort) is the inclusion, from the start of the process, of Aadhaar as one of the documents an elector can furnish - its exclusion was among the most controversial decisions in Bihar - though chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar's statement that it is not a proof of citizenship but only of identity means that field implementation will have to be keenly watched for clarity. Three things are of note. One, a clean and updated electoral roll is beneficial for a democracy but the process must be empathetic and sensitive to ground realities. It must be shorn of political sloganeering, especially around foreigners (ECI is yet to publicly announce just how many foreigners were removed in Bihar) and require the active participation of all political parties. The poll watchdog will do well to take all parties on board and ensure a transparent process to minimise harassment. Two, despite allegations of mass disenfranchisement, the Bihar SIR showed there is no obvious statewide pattern to the deletions, a fact further underlined by this newspaper's data analysis. But what was also clear was that local vagaries such as seasonal floods, economic migration and gender disenfranchisement had a deep impact on the final rolls. For example, Bihar saw more women excised from the rolls than men because of the gendered skew in accessing documentation. Both on moral and electoral grounds (the women's vote is increasingly decisive in elections), this is wrong and must not be allowed to be repeated this time. Three, as this newspaper has noted before, the quest for a perfect electoral roll is a fraught exercise. At multiple points in independent India's history, the number of electors has not matched the corresponding number found eligible in the census. This means two things - that large enumeration exercises involving hundreds of millions of people, some discrepancy is inevitable, and that, when a balance is to be struck between empathy and strict statistical purity, some leniency in favour of the former might do the world's largest democracy good....